Re: Help Needed Finding 'Summer of Seventy' Volunteers

Gentlemen,
There was an interest in no written record on any of the volunteer as it was all under the radar per the Colo-New Mexico RR Authority. We were all there without any spoken authority and the better it was kept secret the less the Authority was subject to potential liability. No one signed a register and no one was being paid that I could see, except maybe out of another volunteer's pocket. One fellow told me he got the coal and paid rental of machinery. Sid was out of food at one point and tied to poach a deer from a train one night but later took the pop-car out on a second attempt. I know nothing! He missed the one in the engine's head light in the first attempt. Don't ask! I did not want to know.

At one point someone tried to use the exhaust from a hot-rod auto (Corvette?) to make a draft to start the fire in #483 after the grate replacement but it did not work. Someone went and rented a real air compressor and fitted it to the steam chest draft pipe. That worked and we had a locomotive again.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2010 06:26AM by John E. Bull.