Re: Alpine Pass- 1897 turntable news

These are great Bruce, thanks for looking them up. A couple points. The first set of three 1897 articles are about the employee falling into the turntable pit. I’d bet the pit was installed even when the building was first constructed, but didn’t necessarily have the turntable. The Apr 16 article says he fell into the “turntable”, which isn’t possible and is just a newspaperman getting the terminology wrong. I’m sure we all cringe when we see media stories about railroads, and the terminologies reporters use.

The Jan 1881 article must be referring to the station of Alpine, about 5 miles below St. Elmo. The rails hadn’t reached the tunnel yet, and that turntable ended up being located in St. Elmo. According to Poor, the station of Alpine’s name was changed to Fisher in June 1899, because of the confusion it was creating with Alpine Tunnel station.

The last couple 1890 articles speculate that the turntable at St. Elmo will soon be moved to the tunnel. Maybe this was the authorization received in 1889, but was it ever actually done? Maybe not if there was no further article on it.

Como, your Gunnison newspaper is interesting, can you post the full text of it? The 1905 date means it was before the 1906 fire, so it can’t be related to that.

I’m re-reading some of Poor’s text with new eyes, as a result of your folks’ input. He states an 1889 timecard shows coal, water and 660’ of siding. And then, “An 1897 employees timecard shows same facilities”. So that was the year between 1893 and 1906 he used for concluding there was no turntable at Alpine Tunnel.

Cheers all,
Ralph