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Denver, Boulder & Western steam locomotive moved to Colorado Railroad Museum
Remind me not to bring my caboose to Boulder.
Excellent! Another loco that ran on the Rio Grande Southern!! CRM is right where it should be, along with the other RGS artifacts collected by Robert Richardson.
You are correct, Mr. Carleton. Boulder’s rather liberal enforcement of the law and the presence of the University of Colorado seems to leave many properties at the jeopardy of those who have no regard for anything except themselves. Glad to see the equipment moving to the museum.
The presence of the University of Colorado in Boulder has nothing to do with the unfortunate damage done to the caboose, as the two men charged arrested for the crime had also set fire to a boat house in Lafayette, and were not CU students.
The original equipment display was in the park by the old bandshell on campus, and as a little boy I loved to walk down to see it with my grandparents. I fell in love with the old 74. The first Rio Grande caboose had just been destroyed when I first visited the display: the charred remains of it were piled up on what was left of the frame above the trucks. I’m glad the locomotive is going to the CRM for display. It deserves to be included in that wonderful collection. George Brown said it right (above): it adds one more former RGS engine to what is the largest assemblage of equipment from that road in the world. Bob Richardson is smiling.
Thank goodness this equipment is no longer in the “People’s Republic of Boulder!”
The story of all the missteps and struggles with this little locomotive shows how difficult and costly it is to keep even a small teakettle in steam. The fact that it has survived is cause to celebrate. The notion of displaying old steam engines in city parks around the west was not a very good one in the long run, but it did save many of them from the scrappers torch. Now they can be moved to more appropriate spots and in a few cases brought back to operating condition. That’s the story of the UP 3985, a real success story.