You won't find any steam-era equipment at Burnham. When I worked there '72 to '73, there was nothing related to those days, except maybe the big overhead crane and a small wheel press. I don't think there was even a turret lathe in there, all the machinists did was change parts from EMD. The company got rid of everything having to do with steam at Burnham in 1957 quickly as possible, right after they pulled the water tank down. Equipment was either sent to Alamosa, sold, or scrapped. The only thing faintly having to do with steam that I ever found was wooden patterns for L-131 drivers and frames, back by the foundry, that had been used as rip-rap aginst the Platte River bank. Bunham was the gloomiest, worst place I ever worked, nobody talked to anyone, and I never met my foreman. Guys seemed to be only interested in how long until the shop whistle blew. I used to just follow someone around like a zombie, looking for work, as everyone else did. About the only useful thing I did was hauling oil and air filters out to the wash area in back of the shop. I got fed up and transferred to North Yard, but they put me on the graveyard shift. The old crane referred to earlier was built for the D&SL, it would frequently be under steam at North Yard and was about the only place to get warm in winter.
That 3-rail trackage in the overhead photo was left in place and used during 1963-1964 when the company built new coaches for the Silverton branch, after the fortunate PUC decision.
That old stone building referred earlier to, SE of the locomotive shop, was the Denver B&B headquarters. I was on the B&B until I transferred to the Diesel house. The forman there was a sociopathic piece-of-work by the name of Bud Ritchie. Talk was he was born in an outfit car in Salida, the son of another B&B foreman. He used to call the Lake City branch a "bridge man's paradise" because work there was never done. This guy used to delight in making work as difficult as possible for everyone except for one of his favorite pals. One time he sent me and another guy up on the roof of the diesel house-- in February-- with a bucket of tar and instructions to patch holes. It was about 20 degrees with high wind, and the tar quickly because hard as rocks. Right after lunch he shows up, wanting to know "why the h***" we were not tarring the holes he wanted fixed. I remember thinking it was fortunate he was not closer to the edge of the roof. One of the other guys told me that once they were on a bridge job around Alamosa. One guy went to move his lunch bucket out of the sun, and Ritchie went ballistic..."you don't touch that lunch bucket until I tell you to..." and the guy picked up a spike maul and chased Ritchie down the track and would have attacked him, had some other fellow not stopped it. This was after a winter on another bridge job when Ritchie didn't allow anyone around the stove except himself, during below zero weather.
Burnham holds no special memory for me, that's for sure.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2015 10:24AM by Eddy Sand.
