Re: Section Crew size

A few years ago I was working with the Friends on the Cumbres pass Section house when a man and a woman came by asking if they could look around. We said sure, and after a look around, the woman mentioned that she'd been born there. It turned out that her father was the section crew foreman there, when her mother got pregnant. The plan was that they'd move to Chama when the time came so the baby could be delivered there, but the baby had other ideas and came before they could move down the hill. She was born in the trackside room on the east end of the building which was the bedroom.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread the section buildings tended to be T shaped, and in the case of the Cumbres section house, the top part of the T consisted of three rooms. Trackside was used as the bedroom and later telegraphone room, in the middle was the kitchen, and the south room was a sort of general utility room.

The bottom part of the "T" was the section crew's. The family said that when they were kids they were not allowed into the section crewmen's area part, so they didn't know much about it.

There was also a log bunkhouse, but that is now gone.

They didn't mention anything about crew size, but it was an interesting peek into life in a section house.

Don