In the spring of 1975, the only operational machine tools in the Chama engine house were an ancient 17" Lodge & Shipley lathe, a pedestal grinder and a bench-mounted, hobby-shop type 1/2" drill press. In the winter of 1975-76, the Chama shop crew brought the 24" Bullard vertical turret lathe from Fort Knox in Antonito and set it up in the Chama engine house. With our now up-graded machine shop, we had the confidence to do the first main and side rod bearing renewal done on any of the engines since Alamosa closed down. The 484 was the lucky recipient of that work. Without access to a milling or boring machine, we were unable to re-bore the egg-shaped bearing bores in the rods and had to install the new bearings into the egg-shaped holes. Because this squeezed the round bores of the new bearings into egg-shaped bores, we had to bore the bearings larger than we would have if the rod bores were round, so that fresh out of the rebuild, the bearing clearances were larger than we would have liked. The side rod bearings are a press fit into rods, but, lacking a press, we had to drive them in with sledge hammers and blocks of wood, a procedure Bernie Watts and I learned by watching Bill Griffin (D&RG shop foreman in Durango at the time) as he was doing a rod bearing job on one of the K28's in October of 1975.,
Conditions in the roundhouse in Durango in the spring of 1981 were scarcely better than in Chama. They had two large (and worn out) WWII-vintage lathes and a drill press that belonged in the Smithsonian. They did have a nice 36" Bullard vertical turret lathe, which Bill Griffin commandeered when Alamosa shut down, thus giving them the capability of re-boring main driving boxes. The floors in the Durango roundhouse at least had concrete in the machine shop area, but not the engine stalls. Lighting was very poor. Steve Jackson, who took over from Bill Griffin, and Larry Beam, assistant shop foreman, as well as the rest of the shop crew deserve a tremendous amount of credit for getting the three K28's running in the spring of 1981, as they had all been left in various stages of disassembly by the Rio Grande.
By the time of the Durango roundhouse fire in 1987, the Durango machine shop was vastly improved. All the old D&RG machines had been scrapped or set outside to slowly melt into the ground. The shop was well equipped with newer used modern lathes and a nice Bridgeport Series II milling machine. After the fire, the headstock of the Bridgeport, which was largely made of aluminum, was a puddle of solidified aluminum on the table. All the other machines were determined to be damaged beyond economical repair and were trucked away. Ironically, the only machine tool to survive the fire was a home-made link grinder that we built using the stand and bedways from one of the old D&RG lathes that had been set out to rot in the south yard many years prior.
Looking back, it's amazing that any trains ran out of Chama in 1971 or out of Durango in 1981. However, conditions steadily improved in both shops to the point that both shops can now perform just about any repairs that might be required to keep the engines running.
