Oral histories of the D&RGW/ RGS

I recently noticed that the Southwest Center at Fort Lewis College in Durango has posted some audio tapes of interviews with Alva Lyons (D&RGW conductor) and one with Dr. A.G. Chione. Dr. Chione tells his story of how Ed Randow of the RGS let him take RGS records from the boxcars where they had been stored in Ridgway beating out his “nemis”, Bob Richardson, who was left with the “crumbs”... an another of riding the Goose with an Indian woman who carried a baby lamb under her shawl...

Alva Lyons stories of switching the Farmington Branch with a 85 car train with cars of oil, stock and merchandise....great stories of how he tried to keep the D&RGW management from abandoning the narrow gauge lines in favor of trucks and buses...how he would serve coffee (never spilled a drop!) to all the passengers who would ride the caboose on the Silverton mixed.

Also in the Fort Lewis collection are some audio recordings of a RMRR club trip over the D&RGW narrow gauge with engines # 480 and # 490 on Memorial Day 1958 sent to Alva by railfan Bruce Aker. He states that they were from John Briggs “North Jersey Recordings” so possibly other recordings are still out there.

Here is a link to the library where you can listen to these interviews and recordings (scroll down to the speaker icons for the MP3 audio files). These are great first hand recollections of the narrow gauge. Hopefully somebody can get people like Amos Cordova and others recollections on tape like this too.


Fort Lewis SW Center archives