Re: Tom Gildersleeve photos of March 18, 1964 Cumbres Turn

Russo Loco sent me a PM wondering why Tom Gildersleeve did not have photos of the March 19, 1964, thru run from Chama to Alamosa. I will answer the question here. While I cannot speak authoritatively for Tom Gildersleeve, I would suspect that the problem was the condition of the Cumbres Pass dirt road. In Frank Barry's article "Steam's Last Full Winter" in the Winter 2005 issue of CLASSIC TRAINS, Frank wrote that the highway crews kept the road open in January and February, but that by early March the highway crew finally gave in to nature, and that photography became limited to the lower slopes - road 17 was closed for the winter. So it seems likely that Tom Gildersleeve was not able to get all the way to Cumbres. When Tom Koglin and I (and others) chased an eastbound train a month later, on April 16, we did reach the Cumbres summit, although there was still a lot of snow.

Frank Barry, in tonight's phone conversation, did relate an interesting story. When it was still possible to reach the summit, he got his VW beetle stuck in the snow, and the section crew helped him to dig the car out. It was so cold and snowy that the crew did not want to ride their freezing cold speeder back to Chama, so they squeezed into the back seat of his beetle for the ride down the hill. He thinks being tightly packed but warm beat getting frozen in the pop car.