Re: D&RGW #268

stuart olson Wrote:
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> it was the last engine that
> could operate on the baldwin and pitkin branches
> as well as the remmnant of the line to montros as
> sutch it can be assumed that she sufferd numerous
> midnite "fixes" that got the train moved tommarow
> but did longterm damage.

True, it was the last engine on those lines *but* it only had that status from November of '52 on. Between 11/52 and 12/53 (abandonment) there weren't a lot of urgent trains for the Baldwin or Sapinero branches. Without digging deeply into various references in that time there was, IIRC, only one run on the Baldwin branch, maybe 6 or 8 to Sapinero. Also in the spring/summer of '53 268 handled much of the traffic on the CB branch but that was maybe 2x/month at most until the anthracite slack started moving in the summer which still only generated a few trains per week starting in August. There were the last stock runs from Iola that fall.

From 11/52-8/53 even the Salida-Gunnison line was only seeing about 1 train a month so 268 wasn't having to work too hard gathering/distributing the loads for that.

After abandonment 268 had some work done on it (flues) in the fall of '54 to enable it to be run to Sapinero in October to gather in cars. During June of '55 it was used by the contractor in teraing up Baldwin & Sapinero (& much of C branches.

In short, I doubt 268 took much extra wear (vs say 278) from being "the last," as there just wasn't that much traffic that last year, and only the stock runs were time-sensative.

hank