2009 Work Session M1/M2

One of the projects at Alder Gulch was replacing the roofs of the four narrow gauge box cars that came from the Montana Southern Railway, a short-lived, 39-mile line to a mine in southwest Montana. These cars have had little or no maintenance since the MSRy was abandoned in the mid-1930s. This photo shows a typical portion of one of the roofs. The galvanized steel sub-roof had kept most of the water out over the decades, but all the wood above it was reduced to scrap. The first task of this project was to remove this old wood. These four box cars came from the Florence and Cripple Creek Railroad. After a flood washed out a significant portion of the F&CC main line in 1912, most of the F&CC was abandoned and its equipment put up for sale. As twenty-year-old narrow gauge cars and locomotives were not in demand by then, this rolling stock could be had very cheaply. The low prices evidently appealed to the builders of the MSRy; all of the MSRy equipment came from the F&CC and the line was built narrow gauge even though its only connection to the outside world was the Union Pacific’s standard gauge line to Butte, Montana. Photo by Roger Breeding.