Coal Tower Usage

There has been some interesting information on the NGDF lately regarding the coal towers at Chama and Durango.
This morning I wrote El Coke asking what the daily consumtion would have been for a K-28 in the 60's in use on the Silverton Train.
He wrote back that with the added coal boards on the tenders, the engines were able to carry 9 tons of coal, and that in daily service, the engines would have used about 7 tons per trip.
OK, two trains daily, two engines, 14 tons per day seven days a week just for use on the Silverton Train. That comes to 98 tons per week.
The capacity of the Durango Coal Tower was 75 tons, so the bin would have had to have been filled every four to five days.
Coker says the load capacity for a Drop Bottom Gon would probably have been 14 tons, so that means every day during the Silverton's season, the two engines consumed one gon full of coal. That means that from the end of May till October, the Silverton train would have used over 110 carloads of coal, and that ain't hay.
So the Durango tower was used heavily right up until it was removed in the Spring of 1968.
We tend to think that things were slowed down a lot in the 60's, but this puts a new perspective on things.
Of course with today's schedules and larger motive power, the D&S must use considerably more coal by comparison.