Nope, Mike, the Hawley financial interests took control of the C&S in 1902, worked well with Frank Trumbull, the C&S president. They helped organize the 50% purchase of the Colorado Midland, along with the Rio Grande Western (to keep the D&RG in check). The Hawley group sold their controlling interest in the C&S / FW&D system to the CB&Q in December of 1908. At that time Frank Trumbull retired and the new Q management began to run the C&S system. The CB&Q had no interest in local Colorado traffic. What they coveted (along with their Hill Lines owners, the NP and GN) was the standard gauge mainline from Cheyenne through Denver to Ft Worth, Texas and the joint ownership of the B-RI to Galveston. Eventually this allowed a direct route from Seattle and Puget Sound to tidewater at Galveston.
And Todd, I don't want to argue the point, but my experience in working in large institutions (hospitals in my case) has been that when management changes with sales or mergers, the new management doesn't start making changes on day one. Nope, they settle into their desks, start looking around, getting the lay of the land. They figure out who in the senior organization will resist their desired changes and slowly replace them, bringing in known outsiders who will go along with the program. Meanwhile, institutional inertia keeps things running. The C&S car building program, including the 1910 SUF coal car construction, were programs of the prior Trumbull administration. The new management simply let that program continue, while they had bigger fish to fry--incorporating the C&S/FW&D standard gauge lines into the Hill Lines mega-system. They didn't finish that task until the Burlington Northern merger of 1969.
And I don't agree with the idea that everyone's desire was to get rid of the narrow gauge South Park divisions. As Dave pointed out, because of the topography of the physical plant, the South Park was a very expensive road to operate. It took a lot of money every year just to run the trains, much less to turn a profit. The only hope of financial solvency for the South Park narrow gauge was a consistent high volume commodity to haul as through traffic. Between 1879 and 1883, the Leadville boom, a speculative bubble perhaps, provided that high volume of traffic. The collapse of the Leadville boom and subsequent UP control and mismanagement made the South Park the red-headed step child of every subsequent owner.
We don't tend to think of the South Park as a coal hauler like the C&O or B&O. But when the courts dropped the South Park (DL&G) into the lap of Frank Trumbull as receiver, he had to find new sources of revenue to rehabilitate the road, along with the UPD&G and its narrow gauge division. Frank Trumbull was a Denver coal man, president of the Citizens Coal Company. He saw the coal from Baldwin as a new source of through traffic revenue for the DL&G, as well as a cost cutting measure for locomotive coal (coal didn't have to be moved from Trinidad to Denver and then to Como and Leadville). It was Trumbull who ordered the Alpine Tunnel reopened, to tap the potential from Baldwin coal marketed in Denver and Leadville. He may have personally profited from that traffic, given his personal coal marketing investments.
As he rehabilitated both the narrow gauge divisions, Trumbull, as receiver and then president of the new C&S, did make investments in new operating efficiencies, including new locomotives. The big Baldwin 2-8-0s (later class B4-E, C&S 71-73) were purchased in 1897 for the UPD&G, though they spent most of their time on the heavy grades of the South Park division. When new freight cars were purchased in 1897 and 1898 from St Charles, 260 of them (68% of the total) were new 30 foot, 25 ton coal cars. Trumbull also became president of the Colorado Midland in 1902, when the C&S purchased half interest. He developed coal traffic from Baldwin to the Midland at Newitt so that, indirectly, the South Park division of the C&S could participate in the Cripple Creek boom. The C&S car building program of 1902-1910 was another efficiency move--rather than buy more cars from St Charles / AC&F, the C&S would build their own.
The South Park division that so fascinates us would likely not have been incorporated into the new C&S, if not for Frank Trumbull and Baldwin coal. The president of the FW&D was forcefully against its inclusion in the new company, seeing it as a perpetual money loser. Trumbull was the best manager of the South Park, not because he liked quaint narrow gauge trains in spectacular mountain scenery, but because it was his job and he was an adept business man who new both the railroad and coal businesses.
When the new Q management took over, priorities changed. It took less than two years, but the destruction of the C&S narrow gauges began in October of 1910.
Jim Courtney
Poulsbo, WA
Locked
