Re: Renumbering 473 and 478 for the movie in October 1968

The movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" used both 473 and 478, first on the Silverton branch and then near Florida. This renumbering is pretty well explained in the book " Hollywood Railroads - Narrow gauge Country". I will try to summarize the events. The first part of the filming was done near Rockwood. They assembled a symmetrical passenger train : 2 coaches, baggage car, 2 coaches, and sent 473 and 478 to Rockwood, one engine facing north and the other facing south, and re-numbered 478 as 473 so that there would be two 473s. So this way no matter which direction the train went, they could have a 473 at the head end. When the studio came to change 478 (disguised as 473) back to its real number, they changed the real 473 to 478 by mistake. The locomotives then operated with the reversed numbers for the second set of movie scenes near Florida. The real 478 made a roundtrip from Durango to Florida on September 20, and the real 473 made Durango - Florida round trips on September 25 and 26, as shown in this excerpt from Ernie Robart's 1968 ng train operations log. (the 1968 log is also re-printed in Jerry Day's K36 book). Hopefully this makes sense and explains why the partially cleaned up 473 has two numbers.