I think most of those diesels aren't suitable for long pulls since they have small traction motors and lack traction motor blowers.

Here's a post Earl Knoob made back in 2012 over at the NGDF; the first post in the thread is a picture of D&SNG locomotives #7 and #481 pulling a train at Hermosa, where helpers are normally added (when used): Warning: TMI! (Too Much Information)

I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned the fact that D&H, and possibly NYC, had steam locomotives that were able to be converted to oil firing for the dry season in the Adirondacks. No need to re-invent the wheel here.

.

http://www.dlm-ag.ch/en/news/215-leicht ... australien

Coal to oil conversion done in Australia for similar reasons.

I wonder what the economics of coal vs oil are for them? In seem to recall when visiting the railroad that the coal comes from the same mine it already has 15 mins up the road.

A little googling shows it comes from these guys http://www.gccenergy.net. Durango seems to be down there in the middle of nowhere. I have to think that digging your fuel out the ground has to be a lot cheaper than trucking it all in from far away. I hope they come out unphased from this one.

According to the evening news tonight, the fire has now consumed 22,000+ acres and is less than 10% contained. Nothing was said about the cause of the fire.

The latest is that train service has been suspended until at least June 30th. This per their website at durangotrain.com

Time to consider Colorado and Southern’s Ridgeway bear trap instead of the simple screens they use now?

If the forest along the right-of-way is burnt, what would it hurt to resume operations other than bad PR? The damage has already been done. Once it's scorched it can't burn again.

Probably has more to do with keeping people safely away, and keeping them out of the firefighters hair...

.

As was noted elsewhere, the reasons this fire is so big is because the timber industry, beginning in 1910, used its influence to prevent ordinary fires from burning themselves out and thus thinning out the fuel load, and later on, shortsighted and greedy developers built homes near and in forest, so it is o longer possible for the Forest Service to practice sensible forest management by letting small fires burn themselves out. Past practices allowed forest to remain healthy, whereas now they are not at all healthy. (Look at the huge number of dead and dying tress in along the Cumbres & Toltec line, from that awful bark beetle infestation.)

And please remember that coal-burning steam locomotives ran i Colorado for well over a century, and many of them die not even have spark-arrestors, yet there were no mega-fires in all that time.

I just wanted to point out that there is a deeper reason for these huge fires.

My heart goes out to all that are harmed i any way by this awful fire. Inciweb says it is now at 25,900 acres, with 15% containment.

The timber had been logged off for mining and fuel. It's had decades to grow back.

And you can confirm this to be true just how, exactly? I can pull up some historical accounts of quite substantial prairie and forest fires from the 1800s, but as you can imagine the historical documentation is fairly sparse and sketchy in largely unsettled territory. Even the well-known Peshtigo Fire of 1871 in settled Wisconsin is badly lacking in confirmable details and accounts.

My understanding from other historians who have studied the matter is that regular passage of steam locos spitting out cinders and embers kept what brush there was burned down with regular small fires. And,. yes, occasionally major RR companies ended up buying out a burned crop of wheat or the like now and then....

Alexander D. Mitchell IV ---
I apologize for making a statement that I did not back up with documentation. I still do not know how those cinder-spitting coal-fired steam locomotives did not frequently burn down the entire forest around them for miles around. Thanks for the info, and corrections cheerfully accepted!

About using diesels instead of steam locomotives to pull the D&SNG RR trains -- diesels do sometimes spit hot chunks of soot out their stacks. And there is a very good reason why railfans call GE freight locomotives "techno-toasters" -- the way they are designed sometimes causes them to shoot flames 3 feet tall from their stacks! (I am sure the folks who live in the area and those who ride the D&SNG RR trains would not approve of THAT!)

I wonder if it would be practical to have a helicopter patrol the RioW behind ever train to look for wisps of smoke, including using thermal sensors to look for heat from fires the train might have caused? I know that would be very expensive, but it might be te best way to protect the forest near the RoW.

Just ideas, that is all.