A handful of Durango Railroad Historical Society members Wednesday marked the completion of another project when a century-old gondola car they restored left by truck for Silverton.
There, Gondola 1400 will join other railroad memorabilia in an old engine house that is turning into a museum. The car’s designation derives from its number in the American Car and Foundry series of 500 25-ton, 32-foot gondolas numbered 1000 to 1499 built in 1902.
The society picked Gondola 1400 from a Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad siding at Tacoma 20 miles north of Durango where it stood in the elements for decades.
It was among the same lot of rolling stock where society members found a 1904 drop-bottom gondola that they finished restoring last year. The earlier car, too, is on display in Silverton.
The anchor display there in what was the Silverton Northern Railroad engine house is Engine No. 315 – an 1895 steam engine that society members labored over from 2001 to 2007. When they fired up the engine, it was the first time the locomotive had run since it was retired in 1949.
“The work went fast,” George Niederauer, president of the railroad historical society, said Wednesday. “There was a core group of maybe five, but probably a dozen people contributed.”
Among the rail buffs who worked on Gondola 1400 were a couple of tourists from Arizona and a visitor from Oxford, England, Niederauer said.
Early restoration took place at San Juan Timberwrights in Arboles, where the frame was built. Work last winter and this spring took place in a hangar at Durango-La Plata County Airport made available by Doug Lashley.
Dennis D’Alessandro, the society’s chief mechanical officer and leader of Gondola 1400’s restoration, estimated that 10,000 worker hours went into the project.
“All the wood and some of the metal had to be replaced,” D’Alessandro said. “It was such a mess from creosote that dripped from railroad ties that it had to be sandblasted twice.”
Restoration started in 2011 and ended only recently.
Rail cars such as Gondola 1400 hauled more coal than any other commodity in the 20th century, Niederauer said. The first cars, which belonged then to the Denver & Rio Grande Western line, were flat cars without sides.
Over time, side panels were added to increase the types of cargo that could be transported. Gondola 1400 was a dump car with doors in the floor to drop cargo easily.
Gondola 1400 was restored to be historically accurate for the late 1920s, the period in which they were most used.
The next society project is to continue work on restoring the Emma Sweeny, a replica steam engine built by Twentieth Century Fox for its 1950 movie, “A Ticket to Tomahawk.” The Emma Sweeny is an accurate replica of a real 1899 steam locomotive owned by the Rio Grande Southern.
daler@durangoherald.com
