The Roundhouse Fire, February 1989

A Working Shop, a Winter Night, a Significant Loss

The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad's roundhouse stands at the south end of the yard on Narrow Gauge Avenue, a few hundred feet from the 1882 depot. In February 1989 — less than a decade after the Denver & Rio Grande Western had sold the Silverton branch to entrepreneur Charles Bradshaw Jr. and the railroad had begun rebuilding its tourist trade — a fire broke out in the structure and burned through a substantial portion of the shop and its contents.

The roundhouse at the time of the fire housed the D&SNG's working locomotive fleet alongside the maintenance equipment a steam railroad requires: wheel-drop pits, boiler-washing gear, lathe and machine tools, and the accumulated ironwork of a shop that had been patching and rebuilding narrow-gauge locomotives since the Denver & Rio Grande era. The fire damaged several of the locomotives stored inside and gutted sections of the timber-framed shop structure itself. Precise figures for individual locomotive damage were not released in consistent form by the railroad, but contemporary accounts confirmed that the loss was serious enough to threaten the coming operating season.

Rebuilding began promptly. The D&SNG, then still in the early years of establishing itself as an independent carrier after the 1981 sale, had both the commercial motive and the mechanical staff to move quickly. Damaged locomotives were assessed and prioritized; those with repairable fireboxes, boilers, and running gear were returned to the shop floor for restoration. The structure itself was reconstructed and expanded, and the rebuilt roundhouse incorporated visitor-facing elements that the original working shop had never needed — a walkway arrangement allowing paying guests to observe locomotives under active maintenance.

The roundhouse as it stands today is a three-foot gauge working facility first and a public exhibit second, and that priority is legible in its layout. The K-28 and K-36 Baldwin locomotives that carry the D&SNG's Silverton trains through the Animas Cañon are maintained here through the winter months, their driving wheels dropped, their boilers hydro-tested, and their fireboxes rebricked on a rotating schedule dictated by Federal Railroad Administration inspection requirements. Visitors in the touring season can observe this work from designated areas inside the building.

The 1989 fire sits in the railroad's institutional memory as the most damaging single incident of the Bradshaw ownership era, and the recovery from it — accomplished without a gap in service that extended beyond the immediate season — demonstrated the depth of the D&SNG's in-house mechanical capacity. A roundhouse that can burn and reopen is, in its way, a measure of how seriously the railroad takes the machinery it is charged with keeping alive.