The federal government wants the owner of a tourist train in Durango to pay $25 million for causing a wildfire that scorched 53,000 acres of Forest Service land last summer.
A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court on Tuesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office says burning cinders from the exhaust stack of a coal-fired steam train operated by the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad Co. and its owner, American Heritage Railways, sparked a small brushfire next to the tracks on June 1 last year. The suit says fire investigators found “a collection of numerous, extinguished embers, cinders and ash particles” next to the tracks and at the specific area where the fire originated about 10 miles north of Durango.
“Multiple eyewitness statements verify that the fire ignited adjacent to the track immediately after one of defendants’ coal-fired steam locomotives passed the origin point,” reads the lawsuit.