A little bit of progress on Warehouse Row

 

This project just meanders from place to place. Recently I have been trying to dive deeper into what the "job" was to move freight cars to and from the various "industries" that made up warehouse row in lower downtown Denver (before it became the LoDo special district). I reading through the book "Denver's Railroads" by Kenton Forrest & Charles Albi again and I found a couple of interesting entries in regards to local freights both in 1934 and 1980. That sent me down a bit or rabbit hole looking for numbered and scheduled freight trains.

My thinking was this would be the "magic" bullet I was looking for that would unleash a torrent of information. I spent a couple of days do some rather fruitless research and then thought about it again. Then it struck me, I shouldn't be looking for freights, the deliveries for warehouse row would have arrived in the yard (I suspect the Burnham yard but possibly the North yard depending on the date) and now it would be a "job" to deliver those freight cars.

I'm really looking for the switching job that worked that area of Denver. In ATSF parlance it would be assigned a Tag which defined the area. For instance when I was originally going to model "the Patch" in LA, that district was tag 22 and would further be broken down by time. Tag 122 would be morning, 222 would be afternoon and 322 would be night. I'm sure the D&RGW has something similar I just need to find it now.

I did acquire another book, that did at least answer a couple of my questions on possible motive power; "Trackside around Denver 1955 - 1979 with Jim Ozment" by Thomas Brunner. While a bit more encompassing than just the Denver area it did have some interesting pictures of motive power in the Burnham and North Yards. This is the switching power that I found:

Alco S2  photographed in the North Yard 1965

EMD SW1200 photographed in the North Yard 1965

Baldwin VO 660 photographed in the Burnham diesel house 1966

Alco RS3 photographed in the Burnham Yard 1964

GE 44 tonner photographed in the Burnham Yard 1964

Fairbanks Morse H10-44 photographed in the Burnham Yard 1967

At least there is some variety in the engines that might have pulled the duty for switching out warehouse row!

Now I just need to figure out how the switching jobs were designated.