UPD&G Coaches #194 - #197

DESCRIPTION

Since first class coaches #70, #71, #72 and #73 are all covered by a single C&S passenger car diagram page, it is tempting to think they looked alike when received by the Union Pacific, Denver & Gulf. But we can see from the photo above and those below that they may not have. All originally had 13 evenly-spaced square double pane windows with a moderate letterboard above and a belt-rail below that ran the entire length of the car. All had bullnose platform roofs. But while #70 had a flat eave line to the platform roof, #71 and #73 had a definite droop; and this is not something generally changed in a rebuild. We don’t know which #72 had as we have no identifiable photos of it.

HISTORY

Coaches #194, #195, #196 and #197 were ordered 11 June 1896 from the St .Charles Car Company of St. Charles, Missouri.⁽⁶⁾ The four almost-identical first-class passenger cars cost $3,000 each.

They were ordered shortly after U&N coaches #131 and #140 were received in trade for standard gauge mail car #1162. Several Union Pacific subsidiaries had been standard gauged and had a surplus of narrow gauge passenger equipment, which the Colorado line badly needed. But legal hurdles delayed things, and then the U&N decided to merely put its narrow gauge cars on standard gauge trucks. When the Oregon Short Line decided to keep its narrow gauge passenger cars for use on a branch line, hope of further trades vanished.

The four coaches were renumbered #168, #169, #170 and #171 in sequence when the Colorado & Southern took them over three years later. Together with virtually identical coaches #172, #173 and #174, ordered four years later, they became the mainstay of the Colorado & Southern passenger fleet. They were renumbered #70, #71, #72 and #73, again in sequence in the general renumbering of 1906, and were among the many cars “rebuilt” in 1915, although we don’t know of what that consisted.

In 1938, coach #73 was among the cars stripped down and converted to bunk cars for the use of the line’s dismantler, Platt Rogers, Inc.

Coach #71 and #72 were dismantled in April 1939, and #73 was dismantled a month later.

Coach #70 was given to the town of Idaho Springs together with locomotive #60, and the two were pushed there up the Clear Creek line 8 May 1941, shortly before it was dismantled. We saw them there 13 years later, and as best we can determine they are still there today.

Continued