Re: Silverton Update

Right now there is up to 7 feet of snow in Eureka as of a few days ago. The county does keep the road open to Eureka, but beyond that, no maintenance. The boarding house at Eureka is reached by snowmobile and the owners are there right now, but in the summer, Eureka is full of camping units and lots of rocks. As a photogenic destination, Eureka has only a spectacular setting--the town is gone, and only the former water tank is standing. The running up the canyon I would think would be enjoyable. I own a lot in downtown Eureka and maybe I'd build a saloon on it and we could get all the passengers drunk, depending on the layover time. But I hope to hell that I am out of that business for ever.

Bill Jones, who owns the mine tour up Cunningham Gulch, was actively working with the Melcher Brothers in Durango a while back to build some new 2' shays with his plan to build a line from his mine tour down to Howardsville. Something about lack of funding side lined that plan, but it was a kick to go into Andy Anderson's office at Melchers (Andy was the last owner of the Telluride Iron Works) and see Shay blueprints tacked up on the walls. Melcher has done heavy machine work on the 463 for the C&TS and built the Silver Vista, Andy built several passenger cars for the WP&Y some years back under another business name, so they have the machine shop capability. Imagine a 2' gauge shay operation meeting trains on the rebuilt SN at Howardsville.

Equipment, who operates this? Well, there are several options and some discussion with interested parties that are very preliminary right now. Worse comes to worse, we have the Casey Jones and the main line mine haulage 3' diesel from the Sunnyside Mine that is operational. I really think the operational aspects are not important at this point--first priority is to secure the entire ROW, then funding for building the infrastructure, then line up the equipment and operator once the track is in place. The D&S could be a factor at some point. We do have the 315 and their group who I think would be an occasional user of this line for their own events.