Jerry and Russ thank you for sharing the photos of Ernie.
Like many here, I knew Ernie and always enjoyed the times we got together. He seemed to always be carrying the bind of the topo maps with the Chili Line track drawn on, that he was working on. You could show him a photo of the Chili Line and he could place the location.
This next part is not Narrow Gauge related, but Ernie was a person with wide interest. Besides the Narrow Gauge and trains, he also had a love for astronomy. Ernie and I went up to near Casper, WY for the 2017 eclipse. Ernie didn’t have a solar filter for the lens he was using but I had an extra. I was his technical support person, sort to speak, he had borrowed a lens from a friend and I helped him to calculate the exposer times. Ernie had me process his images of the eclipse and I was able to bring out the corona more. After the eclipse, we left and ended up it what I called the 91-mile long parking lot (it took over 8 hours to go the 91 miles from Casper to Medicine Bow). The photographs below were Ernie with his eclipse set up and then his first full totality eclipse (with only minor adjustments) pictures.
I think Ernie did a pretty good job.
We were hoping to go to Texas for the 2024 eclipse.
I’m going to miss him and our talks on the Chili Line and keep us informed as to the status of restoration of AT&SF 2926.
Phil