Well, Jerry, I have some bad news for you. The C&TS
is not the D&RGW. All the wishing and hoping and dreaming and praying is not going to change that.
I
can tell you for a fact that the Scenic Railways people, from top to bottom, were railfans, because I was there, and I was one of them. We even had one employee who came to work every day convinced that he had been called to run a pipe train to Farmington. We kept tellling him "NO, no! The railroad doesn't go there any more. There are no pipe trains anymore." Well, that was a little extreme. The rest of us had to live in the real world. We did everything we possibly could to preserve the D&RGW heritage and the history of the line. Just one example: during the years I was there we actually used the coal tipple and the sand house, even though they were dangerous and a pain in the ass by contemporary standards. I doubt that OSHA would even allow them to be used today. I can't speak for all the operators and employees since then, but I seriously doubt that any of them ever said or thought that history has no place here.
The real problem during Scenic's days, and since I imagine, is that there was no clear understanding or agreement among the various interests involved as to priorities, responsibilites, or even what the primary role of the C&TS itself should be. I know that we (the Scenic people) understood that
our primary responsibility was to operate passenger trains over that line in a safe and profitable manner, and we did our level best to accomplish that. We understood that that meant "tourist" trains, because no one but tourists would ride the train in enough numbeers to make a difference. All the paying "railfans" riding in an entire season probably wouldn't cover the cost of one doubleheader to Cumbres. It was our job to restore and maintain those parts of the railroad that supported
that responsibility. It was no part of our job to restore and maintain things solely because of their historic or esthetic value. At Cumbres, for example, it was our job to maintain the water tank and standpipe. It was certainly not our job to maintain all those structures up there. There is no way we would have had the manpower, let alone the financial resources, to do that. That was the responsibility of the property owners.
I was especially amused by your statement that "it is a full scale model railroad layout to some" because I see it the same way, only from the other side. The people with what I call the "model railroad mindset" have been the biggest hundrance to those actually trying to keep these last vestiges of Rocky Mountain narrow gauge railroading alive. Some folks seem to think that if its possible to recreate the D&RGW narrow gauge a la 1945 (or the C&S or whatever) in HOn3 in their basement then it should be possible to do it in 12"-to-the-foot out here in the real world. Well, it isn't.
In the Civil War era song Lorena there is a line "the past is in the eternal past." That pretty much says it all, and I have a class coming in a few minutes so I will turn my soapbox over to someone else now.
"Time spent with CATS is never wasted." -- Sigmund Freud
"Nothing endures but change." -- Heraclitus
"C'est le meilleur des mondes possibles." -- Candide
