C&TS - Spring, 1982.

The winter of 1981-82 was a rather dramatic time for the C&TS. Scenic Rys, the operator since 1971 had pretty much run through all their available operating funds. While the late 1970’s had been good for the C&TS, the economy slowing and the gas shortage of 1979-80 had hurt patronage and once again they were on the skids. They were asking for changes in their contract so that Scenic Rys was not on the hook for everything on the RR. At the same time, Kyle Rys was looking at the C&TS. Willis Kyle had wanted to run the C&TS from the beginning. But got outbid by Scenic. How the Commission got Scenic out of their 20 year contract, I don’t know, but in early 1982, Kyle Rys became the new operator.

There is always lots of craziness and speculation when a new operator shows up, and this was an not exception. I was spending the winter down in Phoenix, I heard all the rumors second and third hand. Finally, in March I made a trip up the Chama to see what was going on.

In the shop, a small crew was making use of the new drop pit and doing badly needed driving box work on 487 and 488. I didn’t take any pics of this.
Over in Antonito, new cars were being built. These “beauties” had been designed by this guy who was a “professional engineer” – type under contract with the Commission. He had never seen a narrow gauge passenger car in his life. The idea was to stick a wooden body on a 6500-class flat car. That they did. The result was very similar to a National Railways of Mexico second class coach. Nobody in the operating end was consulted. There were no historic agencies to voice their opinions. That was it. Here they are. Use them. A private contractor was hired to do the construction. Steel anti-telescoping ends were welded to the frames to be enclosed in the wooden bodies. They built incredibly skinny doors because that’s how much space was left between the end beams…. Don’t ask questions. There were lots of problems with the cars. The windows leaked when it rained, the seats were too close together to be turned. The seats were pedestal mounted and had to be spun to be turned. There were lots of bugs we had to sort out in them.
None the less, Gary Getman and I made a trip over to Antonito to check out the progress.,

Here Gary is checking out the brakepipe routing on the end of the cars. this was the first issue. When the Grande chopped down these cars to NG They of course did it as cheaply as possible. Note the glad hand on the end. The brake pipe goes straight back through a hole in the body bolster. Note the back of the wheel is very close to the brake pipe. All these cars showed evidence of the wheels hitting the brake pipe. We eventually moved them - at our expense.


There was only one fairly close to completion when we were there. I don't know who came up with or approved the "Butter Cream & Redwood Brown" paint colors. We certainly did not have a say in the process..


The interiors were painted a lovely "Institutional Green", which showed every dirty handprint. The home-made pedestal seats weren't a bad idea, but needed a better mechanism to "pull the pin" to release the seat for rotation. Initially the seats were too close together to allow them turn (think airplane seats). After much argument about how capacity would be reduced (from 52 to 44), we got the seats spread out so they could be turned.


Over in the carshop. two more coaches were under construction. One was more or less completed and the other one was a bare frame, showing the anti-telescoping barriers. Gary and I decided if we don't like the cars, we can always strip the wood off and use them to haul pulpwood......




After spending a couple of days in Chama, helping Gary do an inventory of all the rolling stock in Chama and going over to Durango and seeing trains run over there, it was back to Phoenix to wait for warmer weather. The inventory was an interesting project involving snowshoeing around in the yard in 3' of snow checking every car on the property, trying to find missing numbers then trying to match those numbers to a badly out of date roster.

Stay tuned sports fans.....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/12/2017 08:14PM by Earl.