Perhaps no railroad overcame more than Colorado’s Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, which took on a double-whammy of wildfires and mudslides that nearly dealt a knock-out punch to the legendary tourist road. The dueling disasters halted trains along the former Rio Grande branch line for weeks and may have forever altered how the railroad operates during especially dry years.
On June 1, a wildfire started along the tracks near Hermosa, Colo. Although the U.S. Forest Service is continuing to investigate what caused the blaze, nearby residents reported seeing the fire immediately after the morning train to Silverton passed. The 416 Fire torched more than 54,000 acres during the course of two months, forced the evacuation of thousands of people and closed the railroad until July. A few days after the fire started, the railroad was forced to layoff 150 people and the D&SNG’s parent company, American Heritage Railways, shutdown its sister railroad, Washington’s Mount Rainier Railroad and Logging Museum to “optimize” resources.
Significant rainfall in July reduced the fire danger and allowed steam-powered trains to return to Silverton. But that rainfall quickly became too much of a good thing when a series of mudslides impacted the railroad in the recently burned area, again forcing the railroad to significantly alter its operations until fall.
Through August, the railroad bussed passengers from Durango to Rockwood, where they boarded trains for a shortened excursion to Silverton.
In September, a number of local residents and businesses filed a lawsuit against the D&SNG, American Heritage Railways and its owner, Allen Harper, alleging that they did not do enough to prevent the fires. Although the railroad has not taken responsibility for the 416 Fire, it has vowed to do more to prevent locomotive-caused fires in the future. In July, the railroad began work on converting K-37 locomotive No. 493 to burn oil and it announced that it would be purchasing two new diesel locomotives.
The D&SNG was not the only railroad to deal with fires this year. The San Luis & Rio Grande Railroad lost a bridge and a concert venue to a wildfire near Forbes Park, Colo., in June.
Further west, Union Pacific dispatched its firefighting train in northern California on a number of occasions to battle fires that threatened its tracks during that state’s prolonged fire season. While California’s fire season traditionally wraps up in the fall, the drought-stricken state was dealing with fires well into November. In San Francisco, the smoke was so bad, that the city stopped running its legendary open-air cable cars so as not to expose employees and passengers to the hazardous conditions.
In September and October, the Southeastern United States was pummeled by back-to-back hurricanes. Hurricanes Florence and Michael drenched the region with water and caused washouts and other problems on numerous CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern routes across the region. Service along most routes was restored within a few weeks.
On Dec. 3, southern Alaska was rocked by a 7.0 earthquake that caused minor damage along the Alaska Railroad. While the right-of-way was repaired within a few days, the railroad’s dispatch center was a different story. The earthquake broke a number of pipes in the facility, causing significant flooding. The railroad moved its dispatching operations to the Anchorage depot until repairs could be made.
Some weather-related railroad stories had a happy ending for railroads in 2018. In January, after a series of mudslides covered U.S. Route 101 near Santa Barbara, Calif., Amtrak increased capacity on the Pacific Surfliner for 11 days. Passenger rail advocates said the incident allowed southern California residents to see the benefits of passenger rail service.
And in October, after more than a year and a half without rail service, trains returned to the remote community of Churchill, Manitoba. The rail line was taken out of service by flooding in May 2017. The then-owner of the railroad, Denver-based OmniTrax, said they were unable to repair the rail line. This summer, OmniTrax sold the railroad to a consortium of four partnerships and companies that quickly began rebuilding the line. The first freight train since 2017 arrived in Churchill on Oct. 31 and the first VIA Rail passenger train arrived in late November.
For the significant damage done to lives and property, dramatic imagery, and heroic efforts to restore rail operations in extreme situations, Trains editors name Fires, Floods, and Weather, the No. 7 story of 2018.
Read editors’ other Top 10 stories of 2018 online:
Trains Top stories for 2018: No. 10, Giants of RAIL PHOTOGRAPHY pass on
Trains Top stories for 2018: No. 9, Station Restorations
Trains Top stories for 2018: No. 8, Indiana Transportation Museum woes
I grew up next to this train–it steaming by our house, north to Silverton in the morning, south past our house as it returned to Durango at night (This as, at night and in stark contrast, we’d go outside at night to watch the satellites slide across Colorado’s then-startlingly clear night sky.)–and it causing fires was routine. However, back in the day, many of these were quickly caught and extinguished by the crew on the “put-put” car (Nope, not a technical term!) who followed the train 15 or 20 minutes behind.
While it was denied–for obvious liability reasons–I have little doubt the train caused last summer’s “mega fire” north of Durango. Last summer was a summer where a dry landscape offered no reprieve or forgiveness.
And, context is important–and railroads MUST respond–and that is that thanks to 100 years of timber mismanagement (We didn’t know in the past what we know now.) our forests are sick, overgrown and with timber densities that, with drought, are causing forests that are what one Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist called “forests of gasoline.” They explode more than burn. They transform miles of landscape in hours!
First, came livestock grazing, with it notable that when my own family came to Colorado and New Mexico, they were at the front of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad train that came into Durango from northern Colorado and their cattle were at the back. Livestock grazed away the grasses and small shrubs that SHOULD have been there to fuel small, FREQUENT housekeeping ground fires. My personal irony is that, as a reporter, few people wrote more “on fire” and the ticking time bomb of today’s forests than I. Yet, my own ancestors, chugging into southwestern Colorado and northwestern New Mexico were, unknowingly, part of the origins of our sick forests.
Second, came the “10 o’clock rule” in response to the Great Burn early in the 20th century that killed many. The Forest Service said every fire must be out, if possible, by 10 o’clock the day after it started. Hence began decades of aggressive fire suppression, which continues to this day–sometimes more for political reasons than for scientific reasons. So, as the small ground fires that have, for thousands of years, burned frequently across the landscape began to disappear, what few fires there were were put out before they could help prevent or rectify the problem.
Third, came logging. Logging companies (more of my ancestors were loggers) which wanted the big (Read: fire-resistant) “grandfather trees,” which should occur at about 80 or 100 an acre with few small trees beneath them. These giants–some with bases broader than the expanse of a man’s outstretched arm–were removed while thousands, then millions, then billions of small, highly flammable trees remained and quickly created “dog-earred thickets,” thick, sickly, disease-ridden clumps so dense one can hardly walk through them, that sadly, today make up much of our forests. At Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first “mega fire,” Cerro Grande, occurred in 2000 burning much of the town where I now live and plowed through our nuclear-weapons lab, scaring the bajesus out of everyone, tree densities approached 4,000 trees per acre. At the later, bigger, Los Conchas Fire these burned at an explosive acre per second, or an EXPLOSION.
In the 1990s, drought hit the American Southwest, or worse, it might not be drought but a return to historical precipitation norms! That persists, and with climate change, shows every evidence of becoming a norm in a region rife with overgrown forests. So, mega fires have become common place, including a nearly million-acre fire along the New Mexico-Arizona border in about 2011 that sent so much smoke and soot into Albuquerque that it grew dark, birds roosted and the street lights came on by 2 or 3 in the afternoon. People sat in their houses, windows shut tightly, swamp coolers turned off so as not to suck the ghastly smoke inside in a Twilight Zone reality.
What railroads–and everyone else–must take away from this is that past “inconsequential” fire incidences have today the potential to quickly ignite tens of thousands of acres in a mega fire that will travel miles in hours, in contrast to the “big” fires of the 1950s and 1960s of a mere 10,000 acres or less. At all costs, the integrity of historic train locomotives must be protected, but so too must some way be found to control the inevitable occasional ember coming from those beautiful old smokestacks as they continue to chug through history.