The Crew Caller had the privledge of having lunch in Alamosa yesterday with retired Road Foreman of Engines Jim Pearce (he even bought me lunch - what a guy!). Somehow our conversation got into water, the lack thereof this year, and some of the things
they did over the Durango way to deal with the precious clear liquid.
He said the quality of water in the Durango area wasn't too good. They always had some sort of water treatment they put in the tenders to keep the boilers from foaming. He said the Farmington Branch was the worst. The water tank in Farmington had real poor water and the water that came out of Bondad tank wasn't much better (and that was pumped from the Animas R). Even with water treatment, if an engine made more than 2 or 3 consective trips to Farmington without a trip to Chama to clear boiler of all the bad water, the engines would foam on the return trip to Durango. I had heard that engineers tried to avoid taking water at Farmington and try to make Bondad. Jim said they couldn't possibly do that with any kind of train. They would highball Bondad on the trip south, do setout of pipe on the north side of town, then go into Farmington and do the setouts and pickups there. In the midst of switching, they'd get water. I guess the way the Farmington yard got plugged up switching, the mainline in front of the tank got filled with cars or fouled, and the water tank wasn't accessable after a while.
After a few more hours of shuffling, they'd head out and do pickups at the pipe unloading yard on the north side of town. By the time they got their 60-70 car train together and headed north toward Durango, they alread had used a sizable amount of water. If they had a good engineer and fireman and things went normal, they could make Bondad Tank. Occasionally, they would run out of water, drop the train and run to Bondad to fill up. They also had an arrangement with the school in Aztec where they could use their firehose in an emergency.
Jim said when he was running he never had to run for water, but he told me of a trip he made down there with a 470 and a student fireman. They came north with absolutely all the little Sportmodel could wiggle out of Farmington. His fireman messed up and slugged the fire, lost his steam and water. While they blew her hot and filled up the boiler, they used up all the reserve water they had. Jim told the conductor they would have to get water from the school at Aztec. Filling a tender with a 3/4' hose took a long time. Jim's next conversation with conductor was to get hold of the dispatcher, and get a relief crew down to the crossing a Bondad as that's where they would hog out on the 16 hour law.
He also mentioned they would run water cars in the trains out of Durango. They ususally ran these at least once a week (on Thursday's train, he recalled) These cars were used to fill the domestic water cisterns in Ignacio and Lumberton. In dry years they would take water and dump into the cistern that fed the the Monero Tank. He said the water supply didn't fail there as much as the tank leaked so bad, it would n't hold water without fairly constant pumping, which sucked the cistern dry.
The water cars had no connection the the locomotives and weren't in anyway used as auxilliary tenders.
