Bangs head on computer monitor...
Your first picture, Russ, makes my point exactly. We don't allow damn fools to negotiate the top of moving freight cars in rainy weather these days. OSHA would string both the employee and the railroad up by their thumbs. Back in the day, countless railroaders regularly died falling between cars on moving trains. That little bit of historical purity is gone forever--thank God!.
Let's suppose you completely repaint a couple of tenders, complete with correct Rio Grande lettering, for charter use. Will your charter repay the cost of doing that? Will anybody notice besides a few foamers? Then you couple on a bunch of empty freight cars, a rider gon, and a couple of cabooses and head for Cumbres. And a bunch of foamers stand trackside and photograph a faux Rio Grand freight train, then go home thinking, correctly or not, that they have captured the essence and purity of the Rio Grande as it was in the late 1960's and earlier. If that's what turns you on, so be it. But you ain't fooling nobody, no how. Oh, and the general public doesn't give a tinker's dam anyway.
The past is gone. Period. Today is here, with a different set of realities. A local example: At the CRRM, we do not allow anyone on the roofs of any equipment except in the very controlled environment of the roundhouse, and then only with the use of modern ladders, high-elevation platforms, and additional buddy backup. We do not let anyone use the climbing irons on the sides and ends of the cars, the obvious reason being that they are attached to old wood of questionable integrity and strength. We do not allow anyone to climb on or off of moving equipment nor to ride on locomotive and tender footboards--all switching is done from the ground--the reason being the FRA, OSHA, and too many attorneys. Those activities are the relics of another age that will never come back.
So the question before us is: Just how much of the past can be
reasonably preserved in the modern environment? Please note the word
reasonably. The answer to that would probably take a half dozen posts. I think there are far greater issues--like survival--facing the C&TS to lose sleep over the color of a boiler jacket or the lettering on the tender. If the railroad goes under, no amount of correct color or lettering is going to matter. But we have had this discussion, over and over, haven't we?
Look, I am a fourth-generation Coloradoan, and the C&TS means at least as much to me as it does to you in far-off California. It remains an important part of the toolbox for assisting a struggling part of my state while reasonably (there's that word again) preserving a part of our history, But I am not going to straightjacket the railroad in a literal preservationist ideology. The C&TS needs to do what it needs to do to survive. And 40 years on, survival remains the same question it has always been. All else is secondary.
Instead of huffing and puffing on this forum, methinks that your energy would be more profitably spent by looking up all of the legislative members in Colorado and New Mexico on the respective states' Web sites and dropping a short, polite note asking their support for adequate financing for the C&TS (you can do this by email). Don't bother with writing the respective governors (I suppose you could send a courtesy copy); they do not control the legislative agendas or the purse strings. Yeah, this is going to take and effort. So what? Do you want the railroad to survive? Try here:
Colorado legislature
New Mexico legislature
Dives for cover...
Mike
