The Durango & Silverton apparantly auctioned off five more cars this past weekend:http://durangotrain.com/events/RailfestYardSale.htm

What the heck are ACI labels doing on those stock cars??!! Did DRGW really put a reader for those things on the narrow gage routes? Did someone think the cars would go out in interchange? There's a story behind this, I'm sure.

Howard, These were standard gauge cars, the numbers give that away. I know that at least one of the cars was retrucked and sat in a siding just north of the Durango depot for years. I don't remember the reason that this was done, but it may have had to do with moving horses in and out of "Ah Wilderness" or one of the other remote lodges. I think this was done prior to the original line sale. Someone on the Narrow Gauge Discussion Forum surely has the correct information.Don C.

They look to be the same type of cars that the Cumbres & Toltec used to build some of their coaches. AAR type E couplers look really strange on NG cars, even though they are completely compatible with the Type Ds and predecessor MCB designs used by the D&RGW. The standard gauge stock cars make nice starting points for NG passenger cars because the underframes are so narrow, essentially NG width.

Don's pretty close. D&RGW standard gauge stock cars provided the basis for some of the open cars built in the mid-1960s. At least for accounting purchases - I doubt much remained of the original cars when the work was done. There's a lot of steel in the newer cars, and the truss rods on some of them are strictly for show.Any horse movements were accomodated in existing narrow-gauge single deck stock cars. (Hay was moved to the dude ranches in stock cars, as well.)Two SG stock cars sat behind the Strater Hotel on NG trucks for years after Charles Bradshaw bought the line. (I don't remember if he used stock cars when building new coaches - I tend to think not.) When that siding was pulled up and the land underneath leased to the town for parking, the cars were moved and put on the "available for sale" list.JAC