Re: Ruinas de Monero

John, sometimes photos appear unexpectedly. As you know, after my three terms as President of the Northwestern Pacific RR Historical Society ended in early 1994, I continued on as Librarian/Archivist for the Society. Nolan Black, who many people now know was the organizer of "longest narrow gauge railroad excursion in the history of southwestern Colorado" as described by Josie Moore Crum in her Rio GrandeSouthern history book, was a member of the Society, too. Nolan volunteered to help catalog the great many photos which had been donated to the Society's Library. I got to know him as a personal friend and heard many stories from him about that excursion in July 1947. At his home, he showed me lots of his personal photos from that trip which he had cataloged on an old Commodore computer.


The is the same Nolan Black trip which the recent Greg Scholl video "Rio Grande Southern Memories" covers over just the RGS portion of the excursion. The excursion, which rented 2 passenger cars and a baggage car from the D&RGW, started in Alamosa on July 14, 1947. Its three cars were coupled into the westbound San from Juan there. It went through Antonito to Chama to Durango, where the San Juan terminated. FRom there D&RGW no. 463 took Nolan's cars and some freight cars to and from Silverton. The next day, RGS no. 20 took Nolan's train to Rico on the RGS and RGS no. 455 took it from there to Ridgway and back to Rico, with 20 finishing the return trip to Durango. There, it was coupled into the eastbound San Juan and returned to Alamosa.

In 1998,when I was still the NWPRRHS Librarian, I was contacted by a nephew of the late Joseph Alioto, the former mayor of San Francisco. The nephew had some Northwestern Pacific photos which he wanted to donate to the NWPRRHS. They had been taken by a man named Don Howe whom neither I nor the nephew I were ever able to trace. I met with the nephew and he handed me the photos. Then he showed me some others that he knew were not local NWP photos. Thanks to Nolan's stories and own photos, it was apparent that they were of Nolan's 1947 trip. The nephew was willing to donate photos to a historical society but not to an individual, so I bought the photos from him in the interest of preserving them for history.

I put all the photos that I bought (some had duplicates that Alioto's nephew did not want to keep) n binder in album form and took it with me to the 1998 National Narrow Gauge Convention in Colorado Springs. I showed them to a number of attendees including railroad photo collector and author Richard Dorman. He wanted to borrow 4 of the photos (2 were of the RGS) in order to scan them for his collection and then return them to me. Fortunately, the 4 he chose had duplicates of slightly lesser quality so I loaned them to him. He never returned them despite my phone calls to him. Those four now are in the Dorman Collection managed by the Friends of the C&TS. I have identified 2 of them (the RGS ones) and the Friends have noted that they originally came from my collection. The other two were taken somewhere between Antonito and Chama but because of difficulty of seeing Dorman's photos in large enough formats to recognize the 2 that I loaned to Dorman, I have not pin pointed them.

Several of the photos I bought appeared in Charlie Getz' "Narrow Gauge Scene" column in the NG & Short Line Gazette for January/February 2000 ( 6 photos starting on page 72) and in the May/June 2000 issue of the Gazette (5 different photos starting on page 58). Neither issue including the photo below.

Here is one of the 34 photos I bought that day. It is of Monero and is dated July 17, 1947. A note on it says it is looking westbound; the shadows seem to justify that. Since the original "Silver Vista" glass coach was coupled to the rear of the San Juan trains both westbound and eastbound (the SilverVista shows up in one or two of the 34 photos), this photo almost certainly was taken from the rear end of the Silver Vista while Nolan's cars were returning to Alamosa with the San Juan.




Best regards, Hart Corbett