Re: Silverton Northern Caboose

I'm looking for the same information. I don't find in it the Rainbow Route except it looks like the car number was painted above the right hand side platform window, so when I get to it, that paint is in good condition on our caboose and I will do some exploratory work to find it, and maybe the original D&RG number as well. Nothing survived on the sides, not even the lettering put on back in the 1970s is there. My guess is that it was simple at best, and on the letterboard, followed what the SN and Silverton Railroad used on tenders and some other cars. We have samples of the original paint color and it is a boxcar red vs. the bright caboose red on the 49 at the CRM.

There is some original wood siding with an interesting groove pattern that is not like the 49, but is a direct match for the siding on the RPO currently in the shop at Sumpter Valley. And the siding is not a V groove like we see applied with abandon on ng cars, so I'm thinking that at least with D&RG cars built at Burnham in the 1880s that they were built with a different molding profile. The 49 at Golden has a heavily modified underframe that may date to a 1931 shopping--and there's a surviving stencil on one of the underframe members. The under frame center sills are wider apart and and all four main sills extend to the end sills than what is shown on the blueprints and what is on our car, so perhaps when they changed over from link & pin to knuckle couplers that the center sill was rebuilt to handle the larger couplers. What we are working on is extremely close to the blueprints so we will end up with an earlier version of the car. The 49 as it sits today is an interesting mix of the very old to more contemporary use of materials and technique of the 1930s and later.

Fritz