I am guessing Durango only because the cars are on the rear of the train which was usually the Durango block. On the other hand, if there were no other Durango cars, that might well have been the rear of the Farmington block. The fact there are boxcars ahead of the tractors could either be empty boxes going to Durango for lumber loading, or loaded boxes full of drilling mud going to Farmington. And of course if they were headed for Cortez they would have been offloaded at Durango to go by highway the rest of the way. I wonder if any records still exist. Kind of an interesting question. Another possible question would be why weren't some of the loaded boxcars moving to Farmington taken to Durango and reloaded with lumber, to minimize empty miles. I believe the drilling mud tended to leak from the bags a bit and was messy, so those cars were too dirty to be loaded with clean unpackaged lumber, so separate cars had to be used. Here is picture of the lumber loading operation, rather labor intensive (and it all had to be transloaded again at Alamosa).
JBWX
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/10/2018 07:20PM by John West.