Grant Houston Wrote:
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> This car is the 11056, although the 2nd number,
> 88175 is actually more visible on the car in my
> opinion. The car was located just north of La
> Jara and I'm really happy to see the Friends being
> able to close the deal and bring the car home. My
> father first spotted it as a faint dot on the
> horizon back in 2004 - imagine both of our
> surprise to find it and still have so much paint
> left on it and rather complete. Made both of us
> quite happy to see it in Antonito on opening day.
>
>
> This is the last fairly complete Gramps car out
> there that was known not to be in museum or
> private hands - the carcass of 11054 still exists,
> minus the top 1/3rd of the car, so it's far from
> complete. It's possible that there were others
> sold and maybe in the valley as they are a bit
> harder to spot than most NG cars as there are many
> similar sized SG cars around.
Dan Pyzel (chairman of the Friends acquisition committee) has been working on getting this car for years,and I got involved just a couple of years ago. Evan Crowther who owned the car bought it from an equipment dealer in Alamose sometime in the late 60s to store diesel fuel for their farm. It hasn't been used for years, and has been sitting empty for a long time. Evan has a sister in law that has a couple of 8,000 gal standard gauge tank cars just down the road from their farm so I assume it was common practice for the local farmers.
I have been dealing with Evan's son Blake who helped us make the deal and knows all about the CATS as he did some of the welding on the Antonito passenger cars in the 1980s when they were built from the fish belly flat cars.
Blake says their family is thrilled that their old tank is going to once again run on its home rails when it is finished with its restoration by Chris Trunk and his team. I joked with Chris that he and his co team leader Randy has got some SERIOUS work ahead of them the next few years.
