10/29/2006

Caboose home

So down there in santa fe a few blocks south west on the lamy trail from the teaming intersection of Cerillos and St. Francis lies the train car graveyard. Where men wield torches and take apart our rolling history. Previously blogged here.

On my goathead laden ride yesterday I cruised by again and found a strange RR car. I think this caboose is getting ready to be a house somewhere:

click for nice santa fe mountain panorama with SF baldy way off in the back.

The weird part is that the caboose has been stripped of all paint and is rusting evenly but it has these nice Zia windows, that presumably were a part of the original. I can't imagine that they replaced the windows before doing the rest. :

click for bigger view of battle jitney

I am not sure why no one has run off with the windows yet. The lamy trail near santa fe is kind of a transient superhighway with a bunch of little hobocamps nearby.

Looking inside the car you can see that they are putting some insulation in. I think:


click for big.

I will have to go visit it again to see how it progresses.

click for big.

I also saw a really nice airstream trailer modded as travelling glass gallery at the santa fe design week exhibit. The gallery website is here but no pics of the airstream. There also was a funny bike exhibit too with some art bikes of the chopper type and a nice fiat car converted to human power drive. There were also a bunch of old bikes and parts from the collection of cross legend Laurence Malone. I missed his talk last week, it would have been interesting, I think.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like this post, Tarik. My wife and I visited a friend who lived in Lamy in about 1992. She turned out to live fairly close to Santa Fe, and on the same plateau, but before we knew that we drove into "downtown" Lamy, by the train station. It looked very much like what I expect villages looked like in the Mexican interior, in 1925. More goats and donkeys than people, and kind of a scary Manson-family vibe.

I read recently in a memoir of depression-era hobos that Lamy was one of the nastier places to visit in those days, too, with really nutso railroad bulls.

I suppose that today there's a gated community and a Caribou Coffee.