The Lost Language Of Trains

APPROACHED FROM THE EAST, CHAMA, New Mexico, has changed very little from a century ago. The highway over Cumbres Pass parallels the Cumbres and Toltec narrow-gauge railroad’s swirling descent through the high mountain parks of the Rio Chama, with the river valley widening and flattening for only the last few miles.

Then, to the left, a stand of tall, ancient cottonwood trees in the river flat nearly conceals an RV park, while on the right old commercial structures line the road along the bench of land above the river flats where the railroad emerges from cottonwoods and enters the town.

Foster’s Hotel, on the right, is a relic of Chama’s early days, in the 1880s, when the Denver & Rio Grande pushed through the territory. At Chama the railroad built a mountain helper terminal, with a roundhouse and servicing facilities for the extra locomotives needed to pull trains over the steady 4 percent grade up the west side of Cumbres Pass.

Those thirteen miles of 4 percent grade—the track rising four feet in elevation for every one hundred linear feet—are the steepest long stretch of steam railroad in North America. In the early days, when locomotives were smaller, it could require three of them for every five loaded cars.

The engines now in use, built in the 1920s, are much bigger, each capable of pulling nine cars over the grade. In fact, they are among the largest three-foot-gauge steam locomotives ever made, so large that they were constructed with their frames outside their driving wheels, to allow wider axle bearings on the slender track.

The wooden freight cars, most of them made around the turn of the century and rebuilt in the 1920s, differ only in minor details from their hundred-year-old counterparts. Their size and technology remain pretty much what they have always been.

And the railroad structures, the old ones, appear changed almost not at all. A photograph taken around 1907 by Fred Jukes, one of the best early-day railroad photographers, shows the Chama roundhouse with a half-dozen little Grant and Baldwin Locomotive Works 2-8-0s, known as Consolidation types, filling the tracks in front of it. Now, almost ninety years later, those larger, outside-frame 2-8-2 Mikado types from the 1920s wait there for duty. But otherwise almost everything seems the same.

There are many places in this country where the past has in some way been preserved. There are very few places where the actual economic and industrial activity remains the same. Chama is not a replica. Chama is a century-old working railroad town, and the narrow gauge remains, as it has always been, the heartbeat of the community.

The railroad’s customers have changed. Originally the road hauled passengers and freight. Now it carries passengers almost exclusively, and the passengers are tourists. They take the train in the morning, for the wild and gloriously scenic ride up Cumbres Pass to Osier, where they can either continue on a second train that has climbed to Osier from the high desert town of Antonito, Colorado, in the San Luis Valley, or return to Chama on the train they took up.

The Cumbres & Toltec’s sixty-four miles between Chama and Antonito make it the longest and highest steam railroad still operating in the United States. But the work of the railroading remains precisely the same as always: hauling short trains up very steep grades to a mountain pass 10,015 feet above sea level, using steam locomotives.

A steam locomotive’s crew commonly consists of two men: a fireman, who shovels coal from the tender into the firebox and tends the boiler, making sure that it is making enough steam, and an engineer, who actually runs the train.

Operating a railroad locomotive is not like driving a car, because the weight of the train is immense in comparison with that of the engine. The train is an enormous drag going upgrade, it creates momentum when in motion on level track, and on downgrades it is always trying to become a runaway. An engineer, like the captain of an ocean liner, must understand how to use the very small forces at his disposal to control the train’s very large inertia and momentum.

A steam engine is a marvelous creature of smoke, fire, whistle, and panting exhaust. It is also a maintenance nightmare full of plumbing, with pipes carrying steam and air to regulate and power its ancillary devices: a steam turbogenerator for the headlight, air lines for the train and engine brakes, superheater coils to increase its efficiency. All those pipe joints, constantly expanding and contracting under high pressure, are always subject to leakage, sometimes to failure.

And all the mechanical joints, between the side rods and the main rods and the drivers, huge castings and forgings, strain against one another while anchored to the frame, so that the locomotive is in effect engaged in an isometric exercise, finally transmitting power to the drivers only because it is bolted together so tightly that it cannot push itself apart.

Every bearing surface in that mechanism wears, daily, rapidly. Every bolt vibrates and needs to be tightened or adjusted. The engineer and the fireman are only part of the support crew. You need an army of other people to keep steam engines running. And that terrific labor cost is what, in competition with the economy of diesel locomotive maintenance, did steam in.

Did steam in almost everywhere, but not on the Colorado narrow-gauge lines of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad, because the economy of southwestern Colorado, where they ran, had declined precipitously after the turn of the century and then never prospered enough later to support the construction of the all-weather auto roads through the mountains that might have supplanted the railroad as the essential provider of freight transportation.

The regional economy did improve enough during the boom of the 1920s for the D&RGW to replace much of the original 1880s equipment with what is there now. The narrow gauge declined again with the Depression, only to be sustained by the demands of World War II and then by a natural-gas and oil boom in Farmington, New Mexico, that began in the early 1950s.

The narrow gauge functioned daily, if with diminishing maintenance and traffic, right through the 1960s. Long trains of pipe for the gas and oil fields of Farmington were transferred from standard- to narrow-gauge cars at Alamosa, Colorado, then hauled over Cumbres Pass behind 480- and 490-class outside-frame Mikado-type engines, on thirty-footlong turn-of-the-century freight cars rebuilt in the 1920s. The individual pieces of pipe were each forty feet long, so that the railroad had to space an empty flatcar between each loaded one to accommodate the pipes’ overhang.

All those trains went through Chama, hauled over Cumbres Pass by helper engines stationed at Chama.

The Denver & Rio Grande Western’s narrow-gauge line, stretching from Alamosa to Durango, Colorado, with a branch line up to Silverton, was a marvelous anachronism, its life extended only because still few auto roads, even in the middle of the twentieth century, penetrated Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo and San Juan mountain ranges. You would not have wanted to use trucks to haul that pipe over those mountain roads, especially not in winter. And so the railroad endured, and Chama endured, being what it had always been, a narrow-gauge steam railroad town.

By 1968, when freight traffic had finally disappeared, and the D&RGW petitioned to abandon the Alamosa-to-Durango route over Cumbres, the remaining branch line from Durango up the spectacular Animas River canyon to Silverton had become the most successful passenger railroad in North America, hauling 85,000 tourists a year. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that something similar might be done with the most scenic part of the Cumbres Pass line. And in 1971, in what must be considered a miracle of political and bureaucratic cooperation, the states of Colorado and New Mexico agreed to purchase and operate the most scenic sixty-four miles of the railroad—from Antonito over Cumbres Pass and down to Chama—hauling tourists. They renamed the line the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad, or CATS.

This was not a case of pure historical preservation. There were, and remain, very few jobs in that remote region. The railroad represented jobs; the tourists it might attract represented more jobs.

In 1993, when my wife, Edie, and I drifted into Chama on a sunny September afternoon, CATS had been a going concern for more than two decades, and it now carried 58,000 passengers per year.

But the place—the railroad yards and Chama’s main street—looked pretty much the same as always. When Edie and I parked the car in the gritty cinder-and-dirt lot alongside the yard, the brick roundhouse wall that stretched in front of us, across the tracks, was the same wall, with the same grime and dirt and dust of countless steam locomotives, that Fred Jukes had photographed more than eighty years earlier.

The board-and-batten passenger station was the same. The section men’s bunkhouse—one story, low roof—still hunkered off to the left, its walls made of squared logs that had been cut from local timber about 1880. The bunkhouse was actually a log cabin. Its construction preceded the availability of sawn lumber.

And best of all, just as in Rio Grande days, there were no fences.

THIS WAS A WORKING RAILROAD YARD, YET YOU were welcome to enter it, just as folks had always done in Chama, because their uncles and aunts and fathers and mothers worked on the railroad, it was part of the community, and you were way up in the mountains, a long way from the top brass. The railroad, as much as any business not family-owned can be, was family. So was its property.

You were, of course, expected to watch your step, to conduct yourself sensibly, to not harm that property, and to stay out of places and off equipment that could be especially dangerous. You didn’t climb onto a locomotive uninvited. You didn’t walk into the roundhouse and shops uninvited.

Edie and I crossed the yard to the lead track outside the roundhouse, where 497 simmered in the sun. In the cab, leaning out of the fireman’s window, a middle-aged man with a pleasant face looked down on us, his expression at once serious and yet amused.

He seemed a little older than the last time Edie and I had visited with him, four years earlier. But I recognized him. He was Donald Martinez, an engine hostler and fireman, and Mr. Martinez had in 1989 invited Edie and me up into the engine cab with him. We had looked in at the firebox glare, gotten our hands thoroughly blackened and our clothes inevitably smeared. At the time, Donald had worked for the railroad for four years, and he liked it. Now, in 1993, his hair was just starting to go gray, as was ours, and he invited us into the cab again. We hoisted ourselves up into the warm, green-painted interior, looked around, and renewed our acquaintance with Donald.

“I’ve been working for the railroad for eight years now,” he said. “I like it. Sometimes I fire an engine, up the hill to Cumbres.”

AN AMUSEMENT, A SIMPLE PLEASURE IN LIFE CAME through in his expression. His job, as a hostler, was to move steam engines around the yard at Chama: into the roundhouse for servicing, out again for duty; to the water tank for water; to the sand house for sand (which, dropped through pipes to the rail, helps the engines gain traction); to the coal dock, where a front-end loader lifts coal into the tenders; reshuffling passenger cars to make up the trains each morning; reshuffling them again at night for the next day. The number of passengers determined the number of cars.

On this particular warm fall afternoon, he had to move some drop-bottom gondola cars up the track that led to the pit that fed the coaling tower, perhaps the last working wooden coaling tower in North America, a huge timber structure, weathered dark brown.

Donald’s job was to move the cars over the pit, into which they would dump the coal, which would then be cable-hoisted by big steel buckets to the top of the tower and dropped into a huge, elevated wooden bin. The bin has a gate and chute at its bottom, from which coal is fed into the locomotive tenders.

The drop-bottom gons (gondola cars) had been built, like much of the Rio Grande freight-car fleet, around 1900. They were very distinctive. While most narrow-gauge cars are very low-slung and squat, the gons, to allow the doors that make up their floors to drop open, ride high on their trucks, like ladies crossing a muddy street with their long skirts held up.

Edie and I thanked Donald for his hospitality, climbed off the engine, and followed, walking alongside, as Donald coupled the gons to the end of a half-dozen other cars, then pulled the entire train forward to the main line. Someone threw the switch for the track to the coaling-tower loading pit, and Donald began, very slowly, backing up. The gons, each loaded with twenty-five tons of coal, were farthest from the engine but now at the head of the train as it traveled in reverse.

The track curved gently to the west near the main line, so that Donald, at the throttle on the east side of the engine, could not see the end of his train until his locomotive met the curve. I was on the ground, on the west side, standing below the engine as it backed slowly toward the tower. Because I was on the inside of the curve, I could see the entire train.

And what I saw was the last car, and then the second gon, rising and falling and pitching side to side—not violently, but not subtly either. I wanted to say something but hesitated. I was just a visitor, and I didn’t know for sure what was going on.

Then the CATS trainmaster, Gerald Blea, ran toward engine 497, telling Donald to stop the train, that the two gondolas were derailed, their wheels resting on the crossties.

While Donald stayed with his engine, Edie and I walked with several other visitors back to the derailed cars. A problem. But not a major accident. Both cars remained upright. No one was injured. No passengers were involved. No equipment even appeared damaged. The freight-car wheels were still parallel with the rails, which would facilitate rerailing.

Gerald Blea called the shop with his radio. Soon we heard the diesel bark of the CATS front-end loader as it fired up at the far end of the yard, and it headed our way, trundling over the cindercovered ground. As the loader approached, I saw that it carried in its bucket a selection of rerailing frogs. The frogs, shaped like small, merging ramps (or like a frog’s splayed legs and torso), are heavy steel castings that lead the car wheels back onto the rail when the car is pulled up on them.

The trainmen set the frogs in position slowly, with great care, and under the trainmaster’s direction, Donald advanced 497. The gondolas did not at first rerail. Then, after the frogs were repositioned, the first drop-bottom gon returned to the rails, just as it was supposed to.

But the second gon, when pulled forward, got hung up and refused to budge. To pull it harder, with the steam locomotive, threatened to rip out the car’s coupler, and then you had a second problem.

WE BYSTANDERS FROM ELSEWHERE THAN CHAMA ALL remarked upon the attitude and demeanor of the railroad crew as they worked. There had been no recriminations after the accident. The crewmen did not joke around, but their conversation as they worked had a casual, this-is-not-the-end-of-the-world quality to it.

They had a problem. They were taking care of it. They did not seem to mind our watching the entire process, from where we stood, some ten yards back so we were out of their way. After each set of freight-car wheels had regained the rails, we visitors politely clapped, and the crew acknowledged our applause with smiles.

Now, with the recalcitrant last car, they tried something different. Donald pulled his train ahead, clear of the derailment site, and a mechanic drove the front-end loader onto the track, straddling it, and hooked a chain from the loader to the remaining derailed car. The idea, I think, was that they could control the movement of the loader much more precisely than the forward motion of the steam engine. Rather than the two big cylinders of the locomotive supplying massive power strokes, they could rev up the front-end loader for power, but advance ever so gradually, in super-low gear.

First the chain snapped. They doubled it, and they freed the car wheels. Donald pulled the gon onto the track with 497, then ran his train onto one of the more reliable yard tracks.

The front-end loader took the retailing frogs back to the roundhouse. The track crew dispersed; it was almost quitting time. They could fix the damaged track tomorrow.

I thought: Yes, this is what life was like, in good small places. Everyone knows they are all going to be there the next year, and the year after that. No heads roll, because these people are also neighbors and kin.

Edie and I had once lived in a small town, and we had worked for small companies. Those places had their drawbacks. But they had their virtues too, and watching the rerailing of that drop-bottom gon, I was reminded of that time.

I had not spoken with Donald Martinez all the time the crew was at work. Now, as 497 drifted by me, with Donald at the throttle, I heard an amused Spanish-accented voice from the cab saying quietly, “I got it in, I got it out.”

THE NEXT MORNING, DONALD MARTINEZ WAS BUSY, PRE paring a K-36 for its trip up Cumbres Pass that day. In the first hour and a quarter of its thirteen-mile climb, the Mikado would use three tons of coal. The fireman would hand-shovel every last chunk of that coal from the tender into the firebox door at the end of the boiler, which projected into the cab.

Edie and I wandered over to the shop building, adjacent to the old roundhouse. The shop, built of brick and concrete, had been constructed by CATS in 1978. The intervening fifteen years of coal smoke and lubricants had rendered it, in general grime and weathering, almost indistinguishable from the original brick roundhouse of 1899.

The pilot plow of engine 489 projected from the shop door, adjacent to K-27 463, which was torn apart and undergoing restoration. Two men—Anglo, middle-aged—worked intensely in the inspection pit, between the rails, at the engine’s pilot.

“Do you mind if we watch?” I asked.

“No, no, come right in,” the man with the mustache said, in a voice of authority. “We’re glad to have visitors. We don’t see people all winter.”

We introduced ourselves. They were John Bush, the chief mechanical officer, and his right-hand man, Jack Campbell, CATS’s chief machinist.

I asked what they were doing.

John replied, “We have to open the smokebox front, and to do that, we’ve got to remove the plow.” He emerged from beneath the pilot. “I can’t get it, Jack,” he said. “See if you can.”

Jack took John’s place, and with a two-foot-long heavy wrench, he loosened a nut located in an awkward spot behind the pilot beam.

John Bush explained, “Some years ago I fell off a ladder and broke both wrists and my hip. The doctors told me I’d never walk again. Wrong. But there are some things my wrists won’t do.”

I asked John how the K-37 compared with the line’s somewhat newer K-36s.

“The K-37’s older boiler makes a difference. A K-36 has about two hundred and fifty flexible stay bolts, perhaps one-third the total number of stay bolts. A K-37 has just twelve in the entire boiler. Flexible stay bolts were an innovation that compensated for the expansion and contraction in the boiler. A bolt could flex instead of breaking. That reduces boiler maintenance.

“And there are also minor things, like smokebox hinges. The K-36s have hinged smokebox fronts, so that to get in the boiler, we can simply unbolt the smokebox front and swing it out of the way. With K-37 you have to lift the entire smokebox front from the engine.

“But we got a good deal with 497. The engine was in operating condition, and we obtained it in trade from the Durango and Silverton for our 482, which needed a complete rebuild. The D&S had just rebuilt the K-37, only to discover that its wheelbase is a little too long for its curves. The Rio Grande never ran K-37s in on the Silverton line anyway, while they ran here all the time. So we were happy to bring a K-37 home, in effect. It’s a powerful locomotive—the largest still-existing three-foot-gauge steam engine in the world. And it’s a representative of one of the engine classes that historically ran here.”

I ASKED JOHN HOW LONG HE’D BEEN AT CATS. “I CAME down here in 1989. Since then we’ve reflued 489 and 484; we’ve rebuilt the running gear on 484, 487, and 489. We have bored the valves and cylinders on 487 and put in new piston rings and valve rings. I brought 497 to Chama. We’re restoring 463 and building a third series of passenger cars. And I’ve got the sand house and coaling tower working again.”

He stopped, then added, “I said I because this has been my responsibility. But let me make clear that this is a group effort. I am very, very proud of the people working here.”

“What did you do before?”

“I had my own railroad restoration company. Three weeks before coming here I was finishing the Marcia , a 1906 private car in Craig. I spent three years working on the Marcia . Before that I worked on Santa Fe #132 in Topeka. Before that I worked on #433 in Palmer Lake. Before that I restored D&RGW #168 in Colorado Springs. Before that I was at the Valley Railroad in Connecticut, where I worked on #97. Before that I was at the Georgetown Loop Railway. Before that I was teaching at the University of Colorado in Denver, finishing my Ph.D. in anthropology.”

I said to John, “I don’t mean to pry, but what brought about the transition from academia to steam locomotives?”

John answered, “My accident put everything in perspective. It was a wake-up call. I asked myself what I really wanted to do, and it wasn’t teaching undergraduates. I was born in Telluride, back when it was a working mining town. That’s where I spent my formative years. My first cab ride was in a Rio Grande Southern engine.

“Then my family moved to Washington, D.C. They didn’t have a word for it back then, but what I experienced was culture shock. Lucius Beebe’s book Narrow Gauge in the Rockies kept me sane.

“Then when I went back east to Connecticut, working at the Valley Railroad, I realized I could not tolerate living among millions of people who all keep their distance. They are good people, but they are distant. I grew up in a small Western town where the outlook is different. Chama is like Telluride was when I was a boy. These guys working on the railroad aren’t railroad fans. To them it’s a job, a job their uncle or grandfather may have done before them.

“You’re talking historical depth here. It’s a complete property. You’ve got engines here that always ran here. If you go into the coal tower, the sand house, you can almost hear the voices of the ghosts. Only now you see Tommy Garcia getting green sand and throwing it up into the hopper, the same as it’s always been done.”

“Let me show you something,” John said, and he led Edie and me past the machine shop to the boiler room, where two tiny, ancient steam locomotive boilers rested on brick foundations. They were just the boiler barrels now; the only appurtenances remaining were their steam domes and stacks extending through the ceiling. For years they had provided the steam power that ran the machinery at the roundhouse.

John Bush said, “One of these is the boiler from a Class 56 Baldwin Consolidation, shopped in 1880. This other boiler is from a Mogul. This is number 150. Obsolete in 1889. They had stopped using these small locomotives by then, so they put them to use in the shop. They’ve been here ever since.”

John led us into the oil house, a small brick building adjacent to the roundhouse. He pointed to one of a row of ceiling-height riveted-iron tanks against the far wall. “See that tank? See how it’s lettered Headlight Oil ? It hasn’t been repainted since 1915, when they converted to electric headlamps.”

WE WENT INTO HIS OFFICE, A CLUTTERED PLACE full of drawings and records and pieces of railroad equipment, including new cab doors for 463, leaning against the wall, looking like fine furniture, still unpainted natural wood.

“Every month I have to file a report on every locomotive. It’s federal paperwork. Just the same as they had to when the Rio Grande operated the railroad. In the old days they used this cabinet for reports on the engines.”

John opened the door to a tall, shallow wooden cabinet fastened at shoulder height to the wall, the interior full of pigeonholes like those in a post office. Each one had a number attached to it.

He pointed to the little typewritten numbers pasted under the pigeonholes. “Over here are the first five 490s; here are the 480s, 460s. Over here is 223, the last Grant. Over here is 206, 205. Nobody ever went back and peeled off the numbers for locomotives that were no longer in use after the 1920s. It has all survived here by benign neglect.”

Jack Campbell poked his head in the door and waited for a moment to get a word in edgewise. “I talked to Earl, and he thinks it’s a return split. With the firebox door open it would blow back smoke right out the door.”

John said, “Go back and loosen the plugs. Then finger-tighten them. If we don’t take ’em out now, while the shell’s hot—”

Jack: “The other thing is this. I don’t think this antiseize is any good. This is the first season we’ve leaned on it.”

John: “Let me see if I can get some of that coppery stuff.”

Jack: “I’d like to use flake graphite.”

John: “You know, what works better is molybdenum.”

Jack: “That silver stuff’s nasty. You have to take a wire wheel to get it off.”

John: “I still think that the biggest problem with the plugs is that they’ve been so hammered.”

Jack returned to his work. John said, “The 168 was space-shuttle technology when it was new. That engine could run a mile a minute. Before that you walked or rode a horse. Over a hundred years later we’re running this railroad with the same technology. That’s the point. This is a railroad. We’re running the railroad because we have a railroad. We have sixty-four miles of some of the toughest tracks in the country.”

The sun had climbed higher, filling most of the Chama yard, but not the west side of the roundhouse, where the western wall—the Fred Jukes wall, as I thought of it—remained in shadow. There, at 9:30 A.M. , the shop crew gathered for a coffee break. The men sat on the projecting foundation, their backs against the brick. I sat there with them, while Edie kept our seats in one of the Pullman-green-painted narrow-gauge coaches.

One shopman said to another, “I guess you’ll have to get the doughnuts, Fred. You’re the cleanest.” Not Fred Jukes. Fred Delgado. The yellow dog showed up. Or rather, he’d never left. The yellow dog. Not mangy, but very, very dirty, his light yellow fur matted with grease, powdered with cinders. But he had a friendly face and an obliging manner, at once companionable and yet independent. He never wheedled or whined or demanded attention. He just hung around and kept folks in the yard company.

He’d followed me as I’d walked alongside 497, with Donald Martinez in the cab, until the drop-bottom gons derailed. He’d taken a keen interest in the goings and comings of the shop crew, as rerailment procedures started. But then, when the more tedious work of carefully placing and relocating the rerailing frogs continued, his interest had flagged. He’d wandered off, attending to other business, accompanying other tourists, until Donald Martinez, who had got ’em in, eventually got ’em out, and Edie and I were once again strolling through the yard. Then the yellow dog suddenly reappeared, trotting along ahead of us.

That evening we’d eaten supper in town and then returned, near sundown, to find the night mechanic, twenty-year-old Chris King, trailed by the yellow dog as he walked from one to another of his slumbering charges, the big 497 and a couple of 480s, under steam, their fires banked for the night.

On 497 Chris worked the injector, forcing more water into the boiler. He threw in a few more scoops of coal, then, “Here, give it a try,” he offered, and I tossed a shovelful of coal into 497’s firebox, just to say I’d done it.

The yellow dog rejoined us when we returned to the ground. And when Christopher’s mother and sister, visiting from Salt Lake City, had posed with him for a late photograph at the pilot of 489—Chris’s favorite engine, the one for which he’d rebuilt the running gear—the yellow dog paused respectfully nearby.

In the turn-of-the-century photographs, railroaders posed with their locomotives and their wives and girlfriends, the engines polished shiny and bright, the women wearing their Sunday finery, happily perched on the pilot decks holding bouquets of flowers. In other photos only the crew appears, the engineer bearing a long-spouted oil can, his free hand resting on the running board. Either way, there also often appears in such pictures a yard dog, of indeterminate breed and friendly disposition, sitting still and attentive for the picture.

Our yellow dog was therefore the latest generation in a rich and varied lineage. That he was yellow seemed somehow appropriate. His particular shade of light yellow, complete with grime and grease, perfectly matched the light yellow to which Grande gold, also coated with grime and grease, faded with the passage of years.

And that evening, like the yellow dog accompanying us, Edie and I followed Chris King into the shop, where he worked on a K-36. A turbogenerator valve had stuck open. Chris would have to fix it that night for the locomotive to be ready for work in the morning.

Chris told us that he’d first visited Chama as a child on a family vacation, and after that it had been just a matter of time and growing up until he got himself back there. During high school years he’d learned heavy-equipment repair by working for an amusement park.

THE ESSENCE OF STEAM-LOCOMOTIVE MAINTENANCE and repair cannot be found in books. As with many physical tasks, it is more easily done than said, and it is most easily and effectively taught when the skills, the specific practices, are passed down from the experienced to the learning hand in the shop. John Bush and Jack Campbell, at middle age, were the generation now carrying the responsibility. Chris King, if he stuck around, would be the next one. He thought he would: “You know, I get off work and go back to my apartment and then I talk railroading for another couple hours with my roommate.”

But this evening, when Chris had done his rounds of the locomotives, it was time for him to concentrate on that turbogenerator. Edie and I thanked him for his hospitality, and then, seeing the yellow dog approach as we emerged from the shop, we asked Chris about him.

“No one knows who he belongs to. He just shows up every day.”

The dog accompanied Edie and me to the yard limit; then he turned back toward the shop. The sky had grown dark, and we admired the bright stars as we walked back to the RV park, where we slept in our car, under the higharching cottonwoods, with the sound of the Rio Chama purling over its stony bed in the distance.

The next day was too beautiful to stay inside. Edie and I made our way back through the rocking passenger cars to the observation gondola at the end of the slow-moving train.

The gondola, wooden, was built in 1903. We stood up in it, holding on to the chest-high sideboards, and watched the scenery, while the sun shone down and we breathed in the bracing high-altitude mountain air as the K-36 pulled us upgrade toward Cumbres Pass.

The observation gon was full, every linear foot of its sides occupied by someone for whom the rough ride and absence of seating was compensated by the superb view. Eagles and hawks rode the thermals above and sometimes below us. The vast valley was parklike in its beauty, with its lush green grass reaching up the mountainsides to the stands of aspen and above them dark evergreens.

I had grown up looking at pictures of the Cumbres line: Fred Jukes’s early photos and then the railroad-enthusiast pictures taken during the 1940s and 1950s. Many of those photographs had real aesthetic value. But nothing, absolutely nothing, prepares Eastern eyes for the scenery of the West. You must actually be there to feel its expanse and glory. And that is what Edie and I now felt as the CATS train labored toward the sky at fifteen miles an hour.