Re: Pipe Train Questions for Dummies

Your question was a good excuse for looking at my slides from the early 60's. One thing that jumped out at me, as I perused the pix, was beware of generalizations. But here are a couple of observations.
Pipe color. Basically black, but with a lot of rust.
Train consists. My pix from the early 60's show a lot of boxcars....in some cases well over half the train. This was bagged drilling mud moving west to Aztec and Farmington, and lumber moving east from Durango. My guess is the mud cars were too dirty to load with lumber, and there was cross hauling of empties...but that's just a guess. I'm guessing that maybe in the 50's there was more pipe....or maybe my pix are not a random sample.
A lot of the pipe in my pix fits individual cars (no idlers). And where idlers were needed, the empties appear moving east with the idlers still mixed between the gons. By the time the Cumbres turns got switched together at Cumbres to move east, the consists were a pretty mixed bag.
Long trains, typically 40 to 70 cars.
In addition to the occasional reefers and flats with farm machinery, there appears to be a fair amount of gons with coal, cinders, and whatever. I have pix of what looks like sand being transloaded at Alamosa. In the late 60's there was lumber moving east on flatcars from a mill near Juanita, but I don't recall any lumber on flats in the early 60's. And of course the Gramps tanks with from one to a dozen per train.
But it's a mixed bag, and there's probably a prototype for about anything if you look long enough. I have one picture of an RPO being used as a caboose when the regular caboose got BO'd in Chama.
John