The Railroad Riches of Golden, part 4
See Part 1 here.
See Part 2 here.
How Would You Like to have a South Park engine?
SUMMER 1972
GOLDEN, COLORADO
The phone is ringing.
Bob picks it up. On the line is Harvey Huston, a historian and author well connected with the Rhinelander Logging Museum in Wisconsin. Hellos and anything else discussed quickly fade into oblivion when Harvey asks Bob a motion-stopping question. “How would you like to have a South Park engine?”
*******
This brief question from Harvey Huston requires a great deal of backstory. Of course Bob would like a South Park engine, and Bob knew which one it was too. Huston was referring to the old 2-8-0 consolidation logging locomotive at Wisconsin’s Rhinelander Logging Museum. In his research, Cornelius Hauck had discovered its existence and its curious history, a history, as Hauck and Richardson learned, that took it all the way back to 1880 when it was built for none other than the Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad.
The aged engine, 92 years old at the time of Bob’s phone conversation, started out life as DSP&P 51 and was later renumbered 191, a number she also wore for the intervening Denver, Leadville & Gunnison Railway as well. When the C&S finally took over, her designated number became C&S 31, though the veteran 2-8-0 likely never got renumbered or used by the C&S, but was sold for $2000 to a Wisconsin logging line before 1902.
None of this in particular was news to Bob. M.C. Poor, in his historic 1949 book Denver, South Park & Pacific on the history of the DSP&P, noted these facts, along with the dispositions of all of the South Park’s locomotives, whether scrap dates or sales to other lines, but the trail of this engine evaporated after its sale to the Thunder Lake Lumber Company and Poor simply noted “Dates and details unknown.” Like so many engines with unknown dispositions, it was assumed scrapped at some point.
This assumption turned out to be false.
Surprisingly, Cornelius Hauck picked up DSP&P 191’s elusive trail. He discovered that 191 had not been cut up, but instead managed to get saved after, and possibly even due to the fact that, she was just plain worn out.
After 191 was shipped east by 1902 it worked for a succession of loggers. She first worked for the Edward Hines Lumber Company in Wisconsin and was run as Washburn & Northwestern #7. In 1905 she was sold to the Robbins Lumber Co. in Rhinelander, which was bought in 1919 by the Thunder Lake Lumber Co. One source said that the cautious owner of this line thought she was too heavy to be used unless the ground was frozen. By 1932, the now 52-year old ex-DSP&P 191/Thunder Lake No. 7 was in such bad shape that, as one historian put it, the engine was “just shy of ceasing forward motion.” The line steamed the DSP&P veteran one final time, and, under its own power, the engine chuffed onto a park display track where it stayed until it was later moved to the Rhinelander Logging Museum.
The meandering journey of DSP&P 191 and its ultimate salvation was so curious that Jason Midyette, a man intimately involved in rail preservation and restoration, wrote that 191’s "survival was more a result of random chance than any actual plan; had the C&S kept it, it would have been rebuilt and modernized (and ultimately scrapped) and had the locomotive been in better shape, it might not have been set aside for display in 1932."
In the summer of 1972, after forty years on display, few could have guessed that 191 was on the verge of a completely new journey, one that depended entirely on Bob’s answer to Harvey Huston’s almost humorous question on the phone. “How would you like to have a South Park Engine?” One might as well ask, “Would you like a million dollars?” Of course!
The potential jokester, Harvey Huston, was anything but. He worked for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad as an attorney, but trains were much more than his work. He was a true enthusiast who had also caught the narrow gauge bug. Like, Bob, he got it out west, but Harvey’s narrow gauge fever turned him, instead, towards the narrow gauge lines of his own state of Wisconsin.
Twelve years before his call to Bob, a 1960 article published in The Northern Lakes Advertiser, a Wisconsin-based newspaper, described Huston’s appetite for knowledge this way: “A railroad attorney whose hobby is the collection of information about the old-time narrow gauge lines that served the logging industry has had his steps turned to Rhinelander. What he has learned about the old Thunder Lake Railroad has fascinated him. He has made several trips to Rhinelander already and plans to return, for now he is gathering his material for publication in a book.”
A year later, in the spring, he published the book The Thunder Lake Narrow Gauge. During his years of collecting and research he became very familiar with the Rhinelander Logging Museum that had a Thunder Lake engine on display outside. News had reached him, however, of a unique chance to get an even more authentic Thunder Lake engine, one that hadn’t meandered its way to the line, like 191, but was built brand-new specifically for it.
Down in Mexico, the Chihuahua Mineral railroad was shutting down and one of its locomotives was originally Thunder Lake No. 5, built for the logger in 1925. It was used south of the border from 1941 until 1971, and was now being given away. When word of this reached the Rhinelander museum, originally through Bob himself, who was often on the lookout for available narrow gauge equipment, the museum and Huston knew it was time to act.
But there was a problem: Huston and the Wisconsin museum had neither the money nor the expertise to move an old engine 1870 miles from Mexico to the top of the US, especially a locomotive that didn’t match the gauge of any mainline operating railroad in the country. Not only was this a logistical puzzle, but the Mexican line’s free offer was contingent on the Rhinelander museum paying for the move. Lacking both the expertise or the finances, Huston and the museum decided to turn to Bob and the Colorado Railroad Museum, since they had both expertise and, well, at least more money than the Rhinelander.
Bob Richardson and Cornelius Hauck must have wondered whether receipt of No. 191 was worth all that Huston asked. If they agreed, they would need to use the Museum’s expertise and reserves to help orchestrate and finance the move of ex-Thunder Lake loco No. 5 from Mexico to Wisconsin and then the move of 191 cross-country back home to Colorado, jobs that would necessitate numerous volunteers, and surely cost thousands of dollars, coordination with several railroads, and countless hours of planning, not to mention the actual work to conduct the move.
However, Denver, South Park & Pacific 191 was no small prize. The 92 year old engine that started out life as DSP&P 51 and was later renumbered 191 had significant historic credentials to its name. She was the same engine that likely rode and then pulled up the western-most tracks of the South Park Line back in 1889, tracks that at one time had been intended to extend up Ohio Pass, in the same vicinity that Bob Richardson and Billy Gilmer and his brother had tromped around back 1954 in their search for old coke ovens. If 191 indeed played this role (there were only two engines stationed at Gunnison at the time and 191 was one of them), then this engine went closer to the Pacific than any other Denver, South Park & Pacific engine ever did.
On top of this, it is the only fully South Park locomotive in existence. Jason Midyette noted, “No. 191 was much as it was when it left Baldwin [Locomotive Works] 52 years earlier...[A] strong argument could be made that virtually nothing on it was repaired or replaced after it left Colorado. [All this makes 191] a remarkably original example of an 1880s narrow gauge freight locomotive.” In fact, while several other C&S engines survive, only one other, No. 9, has DSP&P heritage, but this engine was so altered by the railroad over the years that almost nothing remains of the original locomotive.
Finally, one of its most compelling credentials is 191’s age. If it returned to its home state, the 1880 consolidation would not only be the first South Park engine owned by the Colorado Railroad Museum, but the oldest authentic native Colorado engine in existence.
Despite the well-established value of the acquisition of 191, Huston had one more card up his sleeve to motivate the generosity he so desperately needed to get his own engine: a two-for-one deal. The Mexican line, Harvey explained to Bob on the phone, was offering a second narrow gauge steam locomotive, Potosi & Rio Verde No. 4, for free in addition to the Thunder Lake engine. Bob would then not only get 191 but another engine to use as CRRM pleased. The engine had no Colorado heritage and it needed a new firebox and boiler if it would ever operate, but, if nothing else, maybe it could fetch a handsome price from another tourist route and help offset some of the costs of these potential moves.
So Harvey’s question, “How would you like a South Park engine?” finally received an answer. Bob drew in a breath and said, “Yes.”
That “Yes” set in motion a long and involved process with more twists and turns than he or Cornelius could have imagined at the time of the phone call.
Every journey begins with a step and one of the first of this twisting path involved locating a person willing to head to Chihuahua, Mexico to supervise the shipping of the two engines there. Bob, 62 with lots of responsibility at the museum, knew one of the many faithful volunteers would surely jump at the chance to take on this adventure south of the border to rescue two locomotives, so in the summer of 1972, with word out about the need, he waited for that person to surface.
Unfortunately, the waiting dragged on much longer than he expected.
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