Seven great Scouts completed Railroading Merit Badge in 2004 by traveling from Amarillo to Durango, Colorado to ride the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Rail Road. The trip was a super "Dash and Crash", with the crew leaving Amarillo at 5:00 Friday, April 1, and coming back on Sunday, April 4. Real "April Fools"!
The trip was worth it, however, as the boys were able to not only see ride the train and see some spectacular scenery, but were able to tour the actual roundhouse and back shop where the D&S rebuilds all its equipment. This is an area that is restricted from public view, and it was very special that we were permitted to tour it. Some of the machines in the shop were older than the railroad itself! Gary, the shop foreman, took over an hour explaining how the locomotives are rebuilt. We are indebted to the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Rail Road for their hospitality.
The crew was: Boys - Jake and Will Chappell, Dawson Simmons, Josh and Christopher Johnson, A. J. Pagitt, and Austin Jones. Men - Scott Chappell, David Johnson, and Tom Jones.
The Durango and Silverton can completely rebuild any of their equipment and locomotives in their roundhouse and backshop. This is where all welding is done. Instead of taking tools to the locomotive, the locomotive is moved from tool area to tool area for repair. If the drivers are not exactly the same size, the wheels and driving rods are always binding and fighting each other.
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This is the welding shop. |
These boys are standing in front of the time table in the Durango depot. Notice that Dawson has his toilet candy at the ready! He carried this candy everywhere for the entire weekend!
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Faces only a mother could love! . . . |
This is a small wheel truing lathe. The wheels on it are from the locomotive in another picture on this page. From across the shop, this lathe looks small.
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| This wheel-truing lathe is older than the railroad it serves! |
Now you can see just how large it really is! And this really is a "small" lathe, compared to wheel lathes when steam was king!
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| Now you can see how big it is! | Gary the shop foreman explains about truing the wheels. |
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This locomotive has its drivers out for rebuilding and turning to exact size. |
Just before we loaded on the train, we all stood in the snow and got our picture taken! The total of the ages of the people in the picture is just about the same as the age of this locomotive.
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Its time to go to Cascade Canyon! |
The D&S is a very twisty and curvy road.
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| It looks like the train is launching itself into space, but the track takes a sharp left turn around this rock cliff. | The D&S is built as much as 1,000 feet above the Animas River on a slim rock ledge blasted out of solid granite mountains. Forty-five miles of hard rock blasting and construction, done by hand and horse drag. Only eleven months. Amazing! |
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| This is one of the "normal" curves. Now, this curve is pretty tight! You feel you can reach out and touch the locomotive! | The green tank is a tank car off its wheels. A side creek into the Animas River fills the tank car through a pipe running up the mountain and into the creek. We took on almost 4,000 gallons of water in ten minutes, then off we went to Cascade! |
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| The ride home from Cascade Canyon is down the same way we went up. | Somehow, though, it was somewhat scary, as the train bumps and bangs downhill, and you fully expect the brakes to fail and you to end up flying off the end of one of the sharp turns at any moment! |
This web page was originally designed by Tom Jones III. Any errors in posting it to the Troop 80 web site belong to Eric Wolfram.
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