Train pledges to snuff smoke sootsmoke $1M during 5 years aims to help reduce emissions
January 25, 2007By Shane Benjamin | Herald Staff Writer
The owner of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad will spend $1 million in the next five years to reduce train smoke emissions by 10 percent each year at the roundhouse.
YODIT GIDEY/Herald Benjamin Feran, assistant boiler maker at the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, checks out a fire box on Engine No. 428 in the roundhouse on Tuesday. Allen Harper, owner of the railroad, has pledged $1 million in the next five years to help reduce emissions from the operation of the trains.
In a way, I’m kind of inclined to wonder how many of the towns residents have been there longer than the 125 years that the railroad has been there? I didn’t quite get where the money is coming from?
A fair enough statement. I was thinking more along the lines of people who moved near a noisy airport. I did find it interseting that a resident said the smoke made dogs fur turn from white to black! Maybe I should move there?[:P]
Durango, Colorado was a railroad town of the D&RGW long before it had become a railroad town of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, if you follow my gist. And I would bet that back then complaints about coal smoke were almost non-existant since virtually everyone in the Durango area depended on the railroad for their living.
Community standards change over time. What used to be acceptable can become unacceptable. Some things are fixable or abatable. Most airports have had to implement noise abatement procedures. Dirty industries are having to clean up their act. Most people consider that a cleaner environment is a good thing.
I’m not disagreeing with you at all. It just made me go hmmmm…
Times change. When I was a kid, there was a big, smelly packing plant right in the middle of town. The city fathers told the owners that they should move the plant outside of town, because of the smell. The owners said they’d be happy too, as they were contemplating a move out of state anyway. The city then begged them to stay. Later, of course, the packing plant went out of business.
Now THAT I didn’t think of, and I reckon that you are right on this point. My community used to have a coal gassification plant, and I remember the City of Sioux Falls having to dig up and dispose of a lot of contaminated soil from the area where this coal-gas plant had been.
THE TIMES, THEY ARE A’CHANGIN’! LOOK at the article in the March 2007 TRAINS referencing the exhaust cleaner put on UPY 1378 by Union Pacific for test out on the Left Coast…See Page 28, Rube Goldberg would be proud…
Maybe, they could put a turbojet in the cab of steam engines, to blow in the firebox and increase the draft, making the fire burn super hot; cutting down the smoke emissions, but they might need several tenders full of coal to get out of the yard and on the road… It makes as much sense as the people out West who have built homes in the shadow of the wind farms up in the mountain passes, now they are complaining about the noise of the wind mills. Go Figure[%-)][%-)][banghead]
Part of the problem, particularly in the last 20 or 30 years, is that the people who want a “nicer” place to live fail to take into account the overall costs of achieving their “nirvana”. Sure, you can force dirty industry to move out, but there go jobs and tax revenue also. That may affect the quality of the schools, roads, and other utilities. Commercial businesses may have to close. In the end, what used to be a thriving city may end up as a stagnant municipality.
Conversely, the opposite can be true. It may be necessary to eliminate the dirty industry in order to get additional high tech growth - to turn a stagnating city into a thriving metropolis.
Which is usually what happens when people start complaining about the ‘smell’ or the ‘look’ of an industry - eventually it will look for a friendlier place to do business. Then you have cities like Milwaukee…they have hardly any industry and the ones that contemplate a move there are pretty much assured that they will have to conform to mega-strict wage, pollution, and union requirements. So they keep building condos.
It isn’t wrong to desire a clean enviroment, but in the end we can’t all build condos. There has to be a happy median. On a related note you should hear some of the artsy-fartsy types complain about CP Rail’s Muskego yard. If only those nasty trains would just disappear they say… then we could put more parks in (maintained by the taxpayers, of course).
This is why I am convinced 90 percent of the inhabitants of Milwaukee are idiots.
Lot’s of towns used to have steam locomotive traffic, and there aren’t very many any more.
Those towns had some bad air problems but most of us have forgotten. Durango (I really like Durango!) has been host to steam locomotives long after they left everywhere else. So the folks there still have some bad air days that most places can only remember.
I say good on Mr Harper and his company for investing in a good railroad and a nice town to visit.
that million would be much better spent on improving the equipment, adding/rehabbing trackage, etc. If the RR closed up they’d have alot bigger problems in their podunk town than a little smoke.
Maybe one of those whining NIMBY’s will get so distressed they will sell me their house for a song. I’d relish the thought of living in Durango and smelling some of that awful smoke. I daresay the sounds of those ex-Rio Grande outside frame Mikes with their horrible whistles is also terribly annoying to them as they sip drinks on their patios. I know as much about dogs as I do trains and the idea of one turning black from the smoke is so patently ridiculous it borders on the comic. Makes me wonder if the crybabies haven’t been smoking some really bad s**t themselves. What the hell is the world coming to?
Forrest Gump is not alone out there![D)] The NIMBY crowd is out to stomp on anything that bothers them, no matter what. My employer’s facility is at a location that has seen medium industrial/chemical production for more than 150 years! That doesn’t stop the NYSSR from turning their DEC, and the EPA on us, even if my current group of idiots[oops] bosses have only owned the place for 18 months! We have lots of waste on propery since no hauler will take it away until they are guaranteed revenue for a full trailer! Last month we generated a record 11 ounces of Haz waste! (at the other end of the spectrum, we once turned out 83,000 lbs. of waste, in one day.[zzz] IT WAS NOT MY FAULT!) We cannot get rid of that for a long time, at that rate! Meanwhile the neighborhood around that lovable mess is dotted with abandoned houses, about half of which are burned out, the rest are owned by absentee landlords. The tenants are on welfare and can get a lawyer to sue anyone they please, for free! Naturally, we all know who winds up paying (win, lose or postpone) don’t we?[soapbox]
I have some serious problems with this report. The only thing that really addresses the smoke problem from 6 PM to 6AM is the ashpile. The combustion improvements while desirable from both smoke and fuel economy standpoints would be primarily beneficial during operaring hours, which are daylight. It seems that there is no one around who remembers that back the day, every roundhouse was accompanied by a power house with a stationary boiler which provided steam to keep the boilers hot. This boiler could be gas fired and a package from a boiler maker such as Cleaver-Brooks or Kewanee should be about $500,000. The steam, after passing thrun the boilers might still have enough energy for a co-gen project to recoup some fuel expense. The only mods required to the locomotives are the steam line couplings which I’m sure they once had and may still have and this would not affect their historical accuracy. I suspect that this idea places me with the crowd who says " it won’t work". It won’t if you don’t address the real problem . I am suspicous of people who refer to steam locomotives “idling” and “thermocouplers”. They are thermocouples and steam locos may BE idle but the don’t “idle”
The smoke from a live steam engine is part and parcel of thier charm. Take away the smoke and what do you have left??? This smacks of another SOLUTION IN SEARCH OF A PROBLEM. What kind of silly add-ons are they going to put on a historical locomotive? That million dollars would be better spent on buying the NIMBY’s out and leaving the historical accuracy intact. Aren’t they listed on the Historic Register and immune to tinkering?
The trains were there long before the complainers. If they don’t like it, move. I’m with the previous poster, I’ll take that trackside property if they don’t want it.
I’ll make one other point here that I haven’t seen mentioned, yet. Just how much smoke can 5 small-to-medium-sized steam locomotives make? I just can’t envision this as a real problem, even if they make two trips per day. Now if we’re talking the south-side of Chicago with hundreds of steam locomotives passing through in a day, then, yes there could be a problem. I just don’t see it in the big-sky-country of Durango.
YODIT GIDEY/Herald Benjamin Feran, assistant boiler maker at the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, checks out a fire box on Engine No. 428 in the roundhouse on Tuesday. Allen Harper, owner of the railroad, has pledged $1 million in the next five years to help reduce emissions from the operation of the trains.