Chris Walker Wrote:
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> Paul,
> to my way of thinking, anything lettered after the
> D&RGW ceased operation of the line would be
> non-historical and should be ignored as Railfan
> Conjecture.
Hi Chris,
The Friends sign crew does share much of your line of thinking, but we have a fair amount of variables to take into account. The signs do go missing, fade, rot, get shot up and otherwise change so they need to be replaced, so our work ranges from touching up paint jobs to fabricating something that isn't there any more but is in the historical record, such as old photos and the old property tax valuation map. To help our current work and to leave records for those who hopefully will do the work down the road, we keep a database of signs being replaced, painted/repaired and such. BTW, Jim Gross, the crew's leader during the C work session, gets the credit for creating and updating the team's database. Anyway, we use the D&RGW's specs wherever/whenever they apply, but I don't think that was always the case over the years. I don't know offhand the percentage of current mileposts and whistle boards and other signs that are pre-abandonment "originals" (or even D&RGW replacements) but some are and a lot aren't. Gathering and keeping photos and other information about signs like those that were on the oil loading facility _ two of the old ones are not there currently -- helps us keep things as historically accurate as possible. In some cases, that applies to post-abandonment signage -- signs installed on Friends projects and the like. For instance, this year we have a tasking to replace a badly deteriorated Friends sign on the Chama stock pen. None of the current crew was involved with erecting that sign so that's another instance where documentation was helpful. It's a Friends-installed sign on a Friends project and it said so -- it even had some now-gone Friends bumper stickers on it when it was new and for years afterward. We don't have those particular bumper stickers and I don't think we plan to try to duplicate them. Finally, I'm the junior guy on the C work session crew with seven years under my belt so my first-hand knowledge only goes back that far. I'm still asking questions of Jim and the other more experienced guys.
Paul
