I did not get into the McPhee discussion below, but enjoyed your expertise in sniffing out the details of said lumber mill town. I noticed the first 3 switches look like 3-way stubs, in a row, just like in Rico. In pix of McPhee i only see ancient Harp switch stands, mostly used with 30-40 pound rail. There is no WYE or turntable so the locos must have always been facing the same direction, unless they turned on the WYE @ Dolores. I have a different twist on the rolling stock used by the (renamed) Montezuma Lumber Co., a few miles south of Dolores, CO. Some of this is conjecture, so take from it what you paid for it.
Thumbing through one of the myriad books on my railroad of choice: The Rio Grande Southern, I ran across an 8 car train pulled by the #42 coming downgrade toward Rico. It was an odd train with, what looked like a string of flat cars with 30 pound rail racks and choker chains for transporting timber. I then got into sleuthing out the reason and circumstances re: this odd consist. The MLC railroad, as it was know by this time, was in dire need of cars to replace their ancient, 3rd hand cars that were literally falling apart. I found a copy of a receipt for 8 cars, with their original D&RGW numbers. I found several photos showing a train of events (no pun here) leading to the delivery of 8 or so, cut down high side gons, in poor enough condition to cut down to flats and add some homemade racks for timber loading. Who cut these down? The shop men at Ridgway did the job sometime after 1940. I've seen pix of the un-cut gons on the old Ridgway R.I.P. track, and a later photo with some of the sides laying in the ditch toward the earliest RGS mainline track, and those some now looking like flats. Further, these stripped down and built up and finished cars were stored for a time, as seen in a photo from the DPL Western History Dept., on the single track left over from the original 1891 engine house area near the WYE @ Ridgway. Another photo shows a condemned load with way too many logs swamping one car and put on a spur. Yet another was the 42 with loads dropping down from Timber spur. I had never seen any models of these so I got busy and made up the consist using code 40 rail and some very small chain for the chokers, and soldered into a sub assembly and glued to the slots cut into the planks. The rail racks would swing down on one side only for unloading. I'm thinking the whole system was funky and deserved a stratum in the Burgess Shale. I used the car numbers listed on the receipt. After the Mill burned to the ground, I'm not sure what happened to the cars. To see the result, open my dropbox: [www.dropbox.com]
This was a satisfying foray into terra incognita for me.
jeff reynolds receiver of Mears' Madness in HOn3



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2018 10:28AM by RGS jefe.