Dick:
We have discussed this before (and thanks for the reference!). I think of the railroad as a 60-mile long spaghetti farm that is about 60 feet wide. What was really telling to me was preparing the 'legal' description and overlaying the railroad ROW engineering drawings over USGS topograpy: to state the obvious, it really makes the railroad three-dimensional!
In my opinion, the Friends are working on the third- or fourth iteration of preserving the railroad. When Bill and Glendon got started so many years ago, they were really doing cosmetic triage, painting cars that had not been touched for 10-30 years. Within 2-3 years, they were doing true triage, stabilizing equipment, making running repairs and doing more painting (the latter never ends at 7,000 feet!). Between 93 and 03 when I regularly attended work sessions, the scope began to widen with ground-up rebuilds of cars and more thorough assessment of structures. Now some truly exciting projects are taking place with the great ROW upgrades, the completion of the OB rebuild, the Antonito car shop, the acquisition of the Dorman collection and plans for interpretation.
Seeing a presentation in Denver several weeks ago of the OB rebuild brought back a lot of memories. (I did not work on this vehicle, but did similar work on 053 and an idler flat.) It also sets the stage for future work that will occur at both terminals and funded with dollars raised by the diligent group of grant writers. The Friends are truly unique in channeling the talents of so many folks and focusing them to provide 30,000 hours of volunteer labor each year in work sessions. If you pause to reflect on what has been accomplished, it is truly staggering. And what is to come promises to be even more amazing!
For those of you who wonder what makes a vehicle or structure 'non-contributing' this means items like the EBT hoppers which are not native to the railroad, or the Antonito depot, which is post-D&RGW (though in the next iteration of the nomination, some of the 1970s-era structures may be considered historic in their own right.
Keith
