I've just seen the post about the Durango and Silverton wildfire case. I'm very surprised that such an issue should exist in this day and age. We don't really do wildfires here on the UK, the landscape and weather being what it is, but several of the Welsh narrow-gauge lines had problems in their early days with lineside fires caused by locomotives. These were typically in hay meadows and had the potential to spread to commercial conifer antations.
The Festiniog (probably the nearest analogy to the D&S in some ways) went through a process of converting to oil burning (although this was also done for economic reasons) but have now re-converted to coal burning. I'm surprised that the D&S hasn't found the need before now, to go down this route.
