rehunn Wrote:
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> This has all happened before and one previous had
> the railroad out of service for some time, seems
> like that was a September storm.
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You could be referring to the storm in early September 1999 during the first D&S "Railfest".
We started our 6 week Colorado visit near the end of July by renting the "Nomad" for a day, then 4x4 explored Colorado ng areas for 4 weeks, then returned to Durango at the end of August for the Railfest. We rode Goose #5 from Durango to Silverton and stayed there for 2 nights. During the day, we rented a jeep there & did some exploring (our own 4x4 was still in Durango). Got hit by heavy rain above Animas Forks & had to turn around late that afternoon. Mud was running heavily down the jeep road.
The next morning, while sitting in the front passenger compartment of Goose 5 at the Silverton depot (waiting for the first Silverton train of the day to arrive) occasional raindrops started appearing on the windshield. Continued that way on and off to Rockwood. The next day was supposed to be our trip on E&P #4. We saw that the Animas River was running brown at Durango but the rails had stopped. Learned that about 350 yards of track above Elk Park had washed into the River overnight and a slide had come in on top of that. Never saw any photos. Two Silverton Trains were stranded in Silverton overnight (they were there several days).
That day, the D&S ran 2 Silvertons to Cascade Wye. Then the Goose went that far; then the #4 with us on board went that far, too. Cascade was totally full of trains! By the time we got there, the first Silverton had turned on the wye and then backed up the mainline for a few miles and stopped out of sight on the main. Either the Goose or the the 2nd Silverton had arrived next because when we got there, the Goose was sitting on the south leg of the wye, facing south and a Silverton train was backed onto and stopped on the tail of the wye, which is long enough to hold one complete Silverton. When the #4 arrived, it and its train (one passenger car & a short caboose) pulled up on the main line and backed into the wye's north leg which was long enough to hold the whole train.
When it came time later in the day to leave for Durango, the Silverton up the main went first, then after a while the Goose left, then the Silverton of the wye's tail, and finally the #4 left after backing onto the tail to be headed south. As bonus, the #4 stopped for an hour or more on the passing siding at Tacoma and, because #4's owner Dan Markoff knew the couple who managed the Tacoma Power Plant, the passengers got a guided tour of the insides of that hydroelectric plant. Fascinating! Some electrical equipment was still in there that was new when the plant was built around 1900 to supply electricity to Silverton. It's on the nationwide grid now.
While we were at Tacoma, the Goose came back up (it was running shuttles between Rockwood and Cascade) and passed the 4. Might have been the first mainline meet between the Goose and the #4?
The next day, we drove to Silverton. The 2 Silverton Trains that were stranded were still there, fires banked but hot enough to keep the engines warm. A fire hose from the hydrant was keeping up the water levels in the tenders (first in one, then in the other). I heard that the D&S had to run round trip bus shuttles of passengers from those 2 trains to get all of them back to Durango by about 1AM of the day of the slide.
Best regards, Hart Corbett
