The Tourist Train

Since my wife and I went to Colorado and rode the Durango & Silverton two years ago, I've been acquiring pieces for a D&S style tourist train for the L&SE. This week I finally added the last car.

Legend has it that one of the managers of the L&SE visited the Denver & Rio Grande and happened to see a western movie being filmed there. He figured that the Lockwood Valley is a heck of a lot closer to Hollywood than Colorado, so his little railroad ought to be able to grab some of that business.

When he got home, he had the shop crew clean up one of the engines, and painted it and a couple of old passenger cars in a snazzy paint scheme that was strangely reminiscent of the D&RGW narrow gauge. Ads in the Hollywood trade papers soon brought film crews to shoot action scenes in the San Emigdio Mountains. With the addition of an open excursion car and a caboose, the same equipment brought in some added revenue hauling tourists on weekends.

My Durango & Silverton inspired tourist train includes two Bachmann passenger cars in factory Bumblebee paint and a Bachmann excursion car. 

The excursion car was bright red with yellow end railings; I repainted it in Badger Modelflex Dark Tuscan and black railings. I haven't decided yet what to do about lettering.

The coach came painted but unlettered. I started by removing the factory lighting, replacing it with an LED light driver board from Jack Regan and a strip of 5 volt, warm white LED tape lights.

The new lighting looks much better than the stock lights, and the driver board at least reduces flicker. Compare these pix of the combine (stock lighting) and the coach (new lighting).

With the original bulb, you can look through the window and see the out of scale bulb. Light is concentrated near the center of the car, and the light is so bright it shines through the car side.

With the new lights, light is evenly distributed the length of the car. You can see the LEDs through the clearstory windows, but they're where ceiling lights should be on this type of car, and they're not overly bright.

I'm lettering these cars using a 1/8 inch Extended Roman alphabet decal set from K4 Decals (the yellow letters) and some numbers from an old Champ D&RGW lettering set on the coach..

9/26/25: The combine was factory lettered for Denver & Rio Grande. I replaced the stock light with LED strip lights, just like the coach, then removed the road name from the letterboards with 1,000 grit sandpaper, touched up the black paint, and relettered it for L&SE. I left the rest of the lettering as it is.

Trivia: There actually is a D&RGW combine 211. It was originally built by Jackson & Sharp in the 1880s and later converted to a combine. It was retired in the 1940s and used as a chicken coop and storage shed until it was acquired by a historical society in Lake City, Colo. It is now undergoing restoration by the Durango & Silverton shops. We saw this car when we visited the D&S museum in 2023.

I've been running these cars with a Bachmann offset cupola shorty caboose, lettered for Durango & Silverton. I don't plan to reletter that caboose, since it's a memento of our trip to Durango, but may eventually replace it with a Mount Blue caboose.