Re: C&S Railway Society Update

To reply to everyone's concerns in one statement - We thought this project would be simple too when we began.
Also we are NOT throwing away the entire car. We are utilizing as much "original" material as possible, provided that said material is structurally sound.

The Town of Silver Plume approached our group back in 2014 to help improve and stabilize caboose 1006. When we took on the project, our initial assessment of the caboose was similar to that of Mr. Midyette. The car appeared to be in fairly stable condition, and would only require some new siding, cupola structural replacement, perhaps new end beams, and some roof work to repair leaks around the cupola area.

Unfortunately we we started to pull off the siding, we found things we did not expect. We found rotted wall framing between the exterior and interior siding where water had entered the walls from the cupola. The cupola itself was half rotted away after being exposed to the mountain weather since 1941. The buffer or platform sills are toast, as are the center and intermediate sills directly under each of the end platforms (the top of these sills under the platforms were so rotted there wasn't much material to retain the nails from the platform boards).
In regards to the frame of caboose 1006, please tell me what is wrong with the following photographs:





Are caboose frames supposed to have an 'S' curve to them? The car has begun to sag and collapse on itself, and it no longer square to itself or the rest of the world. Due to all of the frame members and the rest of the car being interconnected, there is no way to correct the cars bad posture without taking the frame apart. And thus the decision was made to build a new frame for the caboose.

All of this goes back to the question of Passive Preservation vs. Active Preservation.
Our opinion, which obviously differs from that of Mr. Midyette, is that having this artifact CAPABLE of operation will preserve it for much longer than to leaving the car alone and hoping it survives into the future. The Town of Silver Plume maintains ownership of caboose 1006, and the decision of whether to actually operate this car lies with them.

I apologize if we have offended anyone by trying to pay attention to a unique piece of C&S narrow gauge equipment that has not had much attention since the 1990's. We saw a piece of C&S equipment that needed attention and no one else seemed to care, so we stepped in to preserve what we could.

Regards,
Shane Schabow
C&S Railway Society