Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online

Chapter 2

1007 1/8/1981 – 1338 1/8/1981:
C&SL Snowplow Extra One

Don Kuralt and his bulldozer weren’t doing too well with the burning hopper cars, Fred Linder soon found out. It was already hot around them, and the firefighters were at some risk to run up to the first hopper car for even seconds at a time, but relays of running figures had run a chain to a step on the first hopper to the back of the D-2. Whitehall, wearing a face mask, had just returned from an attempt at turning the hand wheel to release the brakes on the first car.

“The brakes are set on those cars,” he reported. “It’s too hot in there to get back to the other cars. I don’t think I stand a chance of moving them, but we’re getting about ready to try.”

In a few more seconds, he was taking the slack out of the heavy chain. In his lowest gear, he poured the coal to the bulldozer’s diesel, but the weight was too much and the bulldozer stalled.

With the engine started again, Linder took off his face mask for a moment and yelled, “Jerk ’em.”

Kuralt nodded and backed the Cat up twenty feet, then charged forward with everything he had. The chain’s slack came out in a hurry; the chain went TWANG, then snapped. Kuralt dived to one side of the bulldozer as a broken end of it went past his ear like a shot. He stopped the Cat’s waddle, climbed off, and walked slowly over to Linder, his body shaking from the close call. “Jesus,” he said.

“Yeah,” the chief replied, shaken himself. “Well, that’s out. What the hell do we do now? Stronger chain, maybe?

“No,” Kuralt replied, still shaking. “The Cat isn’t going to be able to touch those things. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the railroad can shove a couple of empty cars in there, hook on, and maybe pull them out. Those big diesels and their electric motors can pull from a dead stop. Maybe they can get ’em out of there.”

“It’ll take hours for them to get one of those engines up here in this weather, and I don’t think we’ve got hours.”

Kuralt nodded and replied. “Don’t think so either, but I can’t think of anything else in town that has the slightest chance of getting those shitting things out of there.”

The Camden and Spearfish Lake Railroad owned two rail snowplows. Bud Ellsberg guessed that there was an equipment number on them somewhere, but everyone just called them “the little plow” and “the big plow.”

The little plow was kept at Camden. It had been remodeled from an old gondola by the long-gone Minneapolis and St. Louis. The gon had been shortened, and a homemade blade made from flat steel plate and a couple of curved sections of old wrecked tank car had been added. The first winter they’d had the big plow, it had proven cumbersome for cleaning out all the little industrial sidings in Camden, so when Bud found the little plow awaiting the cutter’s torch on the Chicago trip that had resulted in the Burlington, he had been quick to buy it on the spot.

The big plow was something else. Where the crew of the Chessie could see over the top of the blade of the little plow, the big plow stuck up in the air fully as high as the top of the Rock’s cab. Another Rock Island veteran, it had been remodeled from the tender of some long-forgotten steam locomotive, and had been purchased at the same time that the Rock was acquired. It could be more than a bit difficult to use, since the plow blinded the engineer to anything that was happening in front of him. This deficiency had been relieved – but only somewhat relieved – by the addition of a small, unheated cab above and behind the blade, in which a spotter could ride to look ahead. From this cab, there was a telephone connection to the engine, but the C&SL rarely hooked it up; engineer and spotter just used VHF radios to talk with one another.

Just as a shaken Kuralt climbed down from his bulldozer, John Penny was bouncing around inside the big plow’s cab while Plow Extra One struggled up the tracks to Warsaw. The plow rocked and shuddered as it crashed through drift after drift. Each one seemed to explode on impact, blocking Penny’s vision and pounding the heavy armored glass with chunks of hard-packed snow.

In the Rock’s cab, the speedometer needle bounced wildly between fifteen and thirty-five miles per hour; the constantly buzzing wheel-slip indicator almost drowned out the sound of the diesel. Bud knew from his gauges that the Rock was putting out about seventy-five percent power as they crashed up the track. All in all, he thought, Plow Extra One was doing well. Bud noted from the side of his cab that they were nearing the Hoselton crossing. The big plow, and lots of power, were doing their job; there hadn’t been a cut yet where Bud had to back up for another run to crash through, though there had been a few close calls. They had just finished up one of those sticky cuts when Bud called to Penny on the VHF, “How you doing?”

“Oh, I’m doing OK,” John replied. “I just wish I’d had an appointment to get my teeth fixed today.”

“Young stud like you, I can believe it,” Bud smirked. “Up here, when a logger says that, what he means is that he wants to get fixed up.”

“I could stand for that,” Penny agreed. “Who wouldn’t take a soft, warm body over this hard, cold snow?”

Just then Betty’s voice on the VHF caught Bud and John’s attention over all the other noise in their cabs. “Jeez, I thought we were still in the hole,” Bud thought, a little embarrassed at their subject matter.

The VHF radios scattered all around the C&SL were a valuable part of the whole operation, even though they had their limits. Tuned to the D&O yard frequency because of the Camden interchange, they were pretty much line of sight rigs, and in this hilly country, sometimes line of sight wasn’t very far.

But VHF could be fluky. For instance, in the valley about a third of the way from Spearfish Lake to Warsaw, the train was radio-blind for several miles, but up on the flats near Hoselton, farther away and supposedly out of VHF range, communications were universally good – but as the train neared Warsaw, only a little further away, they were again radio-blind from Spearfish Lake.

“I just got a call from the fire department in Warsaw,” Betty’s voice squawked over the speakers on the two radios. “They’ve got a fire up there and they want you to move some hopper cars. I told them you were already on your way up there. The fire chief is going to be calling you in a few minutes, as soon as he can get to the radio in the plant office.”

“OK, Betty, thanks,” Bud replied. “We’ll get our butts up there. John, remember I told you we weren’t gonna hurry?”

“Yeah?”

“I was wrong,” Bud said, microphone in one hand, while reaching for the throttle with the other. “I’m gonna goose this rig. Hang on.”

As Bud notched the throttle up, the roar of the two Geeps increased. To go much faster would take some inspired throttle jockeying, but the going was easy just then and the speedometer needle was hanging near twenty and meaning it when a strange voice came over the radio: Linder, calling from the C&SL VHF that Bud had put in the office at the paper plant. “Your office gal tells me you’re on your way up here. How much longer are you gonna be?”

Bud thought for a moment. They were coming up on the Hoselton crossing, about ten miles from Warsaw. “If we can keep up the speed we’re making now, about half an hour, but I can’t guarantee I’m going to be able to hold that speed. There’s a lot of snow out here, but I’m coming as hard as I can.”

“Damn, that’s better than I’d hoped,” the fire chief replied. “Get here as quick as you can. Those fertilizer hoppers are puking toxic gas and shit all over the place, and we’ve got to get them out of here or we’re going to have to evacuate the town. About the only place we’ve got to evacuate to is the school, and that’s pretty close to the fire. Right now, it’s crosswind from the hopper cars, and if the wind holds, it ought to be safe. Guess we’d better get started, anyway.”

“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” Bud promised, understanding Linder’s rambling perfectly. That man was worried.

Bud hung up the microphone and turned back to the job of running the engines with a renewed vengeance. Inexplicably, the Geep lashup was running slower than it had been a few moments before.

Bud started looking at the gauges. The load meter was relatively low, in spite of the speed slowly sinking. According to the gauges, the Rock was putting out normally. Bud knew that it could have been the Burlington acting up, but there was no real way to tell from where he was, and he wasn’t about to stop to go back and check the gauges on the green GP-7.

Picking up the microphone, he called Penny. “How’s it going up there?”

“Oh, pretty good. We’re going through some easy stuff.”

They were definitely down on power. “Can you see anything wrong with 104?” Bud called.

It took a moment for the brakeman to reply. “Can’t see a thing, but I can’t see much from here, anyway. It’s putting out about as much exhaust smoke as the Rock. Can’t see anything loose or anything. We got trouble?”

“Yeah, something doesn’t seem to be putting out like it should. It might just be my imagination, though.” Bud knew that he was lying to himself. The speedometer was sinking.

The engines continued to press on while Bud thought. Evacuate the town? They had to be in real trouble in Warsaw. Without any good reason, except for a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he again reached for the radio and called his office.

Fortunately, he was still in the right area to reach Spearfish Lake. “Betty,” he ordered, “Call Walt at home, and tell him to get his butt down to the office as quick as he can and get the Milwaukee warmed up.”

“What do you want him to do with it?”

“Don’t know yet,” Bud admitted. “Something tells me we’re going to need her. And I’ll bet that if we need her, we’re going to need her bad.”

Not much later, a couple miles out from Warsaw, both Bud and John could smell the acridness of smoke on the wind. Buried in the faint smell of the smoke was an even fainter something else, and that something else wasn’t pleasant at all.

Through the low visibility of the blowing snow, Bud could see familiar landmarks buried by drifts, and could tell that the County Road 232 crossing was near. He pulled on the whistle cord, but the Rock’s horn only emitted a faint mewling. He pulled the cord again and again, for he knew that the horn must be filled with drifting snow, and eventually the Rock’s familiar bellow defied the roar of the storm.

Down near the burning hopper cars, Fred Linder heard the faint sounds of the whistle. He turned to Marshall and said, “Well, they’re finally here. I’m going to take my snowmobile and go catch them at the switch.”

There were several switches involved in getting to the siding with the hopper cars. Plow Extra One was at a dead stop while Bud waited for John to climb down from the cupola of the plow to dig out and throw the switch from the passing track to the industrial siding. The fire chief’s snowmobile stopped next to the cab of the blue engine, and Linder climbed up the steps to where Bud waited.

“How’s it going?” Bud asked.

“Bad,” Linder replied. “All those goddamn hoppers are going now, and we’re trying to evacuate the town, but it isn’t going too good with all this snow. It could take us hours to get everybody over to the school. With all this wind, the farther from the fire the safer it is, but there’s no roads open far enough out to be safe. We’re having to take everyone to the school up Plant Street, right by the fire, but at least that’s upwind of it.”

Bud glanced out the window, just past the corner of the plow. John had been working on the switch, and at that moment his voice came over the VHF: “OK, I’ve got that one. I’ll hike up to the next one; it’s only fifty yards or so.”

“OK,” Bud replied into the radio, then turned back to the fire chief. “Just where the hell is this fire, anyway? Since you said hopper cars, I thought you meant the fertilizer plant, but there doesn’t seem to be anything burning over there.”

“It’s not the fertilizer plant,” Linder replied, filling the engineer in on the location.

Bud reached for the VHF microphone again. “John, hold everything. We’re not going up to Northern Fertilizer. We’re going up the paper plant siding. Throw that switch back the other way.” A few moments later, Penny was in the cab of the Rock as Bud eased the snowplow train forward through the switches.

Linder had Bud stop next to a fire engine near the main plant building. “Might as well have you guys see what the problem is,” he said. The three climbed down from the idling engine and walked crosswind through the driving snow, around the corner of the plant to where they could see the hopper cars.

By now, it was hotter around the stricken cars. Flames were leaping up from the burning pulp logs behind them, and a thick cloud of evil-looking smoke belched from the hatches. The hatch covers were banging up and down as the hot gases inside tried to make their escape.

“My God, would you look at that,” Penny said quietly.

“We don’t dare get any closer than this without wearing face masks,” Linder said, pointing to the bottle of compressed air that hung dangling over his shoulder. “And it’s hotter than a two-dollar pistol in there. One of my guys thought you could move them by taking a couple of empty cars in front of you with the coupler open, so you wouldn’t have to get too close.”

Bud shook his head. “We don’t have any empty cars with us. The only ones we could use for idler cars would be those full ones over at the fertilizer plant. If we got stuck in there and had to cut them off, you’d have an even worse problem than you’ve got now.” The fireman nodded his head in agreement, and Bud went on, “There is a coupler on the front of the plow. The plow is only full of ballast, and the blade would make a pretty good shield.”

“You think you can move them, then?”

“God, I don’t know, Fred.” Bud shook his head. “They probably set the brakes when they parked those things, but we can try. We can head in there with the plow coupler open and hook on. We couldn’t hook up the air, but shit, the hoses are probably burnt away by now, anyway. We’ll just have to try to drag the damn things out, brakes or no. I don’t know if we’ve got enough power here to do it. Can you get us a couple of those air-pack things? And maybe fifty feet of rope, say, quarter inch?”

“Sure can,” the fire chief agreed, and headed for the fire truck while Bud and John headed back toward the big plow, to clear the crusted snow off the coupler and make sure it was open and ready.

After a minute, Linder joined them, carrying a couple of the bulky face masks, and after he helped them finish with the coupler, he showed the railroaders how to buckle them on. “We’d better get our signals straight before we get going,” Bud said. “John, you take that rope and tie it to the uncoupling lever behind the plow’s blade. Run the rope back to the Rock’s cab, and tie it to the handrail. Fred, you take John’s radio, and go back about to where we looked at those cars, and tell me how close I’m getting to them, since with that big-assed plow blade I can’t see a thing. I’m planning to go in there fast, but I don’t want to hit them too hard. OK?”

The fireman nodded, and Bud went on. “When we get hooked up, I’ll pop those cars once. If we get them moving, I’ll try to keep them moving at least until the 232 crossing. How long is the air in these things good for?”

“About forty minutes,” Linder said.

“All right, we’ll stop there, and you can get us some fresh ones. We’ll try to release the brakes, and if we can, we’ll drag the damn things clear down to the Hoselton siding where they can burn in peace and all that toxic crap can only kill a few coyotes.”

The fireman nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

Bud went on. “OK, John, if I can’t move those cars, I’ll hit the whistle, and you yank that uncoupling rope for all you’re worth. If you can’t get the plow to uncouple from the hoppers, don’t wait for me, just get down there and uncouple from the plow, and I’ll back down as soon as you’ve got us loose. Got that?”

“Sure do,” Penny replied. If you can’t get them to move, get us the hell loose. Right.”

“OK, Fred, can you have an engine wet down the tracks under the cars? I’m going to need all the help I can get, and maybe that’ll help us skid them some.”

“Can do.”

“Just don’t get anything under the engines,” Bud cautioned.

A couple minutes later, the two railroad men were up in the Rock’s cab, breathing bottled air. The VHF set crackled with Linder’s voice. “We’re ready when you are.”

Bud looked at John. The brakeman nodded, and Bud reached for the throttle.

The Rock and the Burlington belched black smoke from their stacks as Bud fed a lot of power roughly to them. The engines bellowed, and Bud yanked on the whistle cord. Plow Extra One pushed quickly out past the downwind side of the main plant with the plow spraying snow to each side, swung around the curve of light rail, and pointed straight at the burning fertilizer hoppers.

The VHF came alive again with Linder’s voice. “About a hundred yards to go . . . eighty . . . sixty.” Bud backed off on the power; he was perhaps going a bit too hard. The VHF set continued to blare “Fifty . . . forty . . . ”

Bud came back hard on the power and started dropping sand. “ . . . thirty . . . twenty . . . ten . . . ” Bud cut the throttle and reached for the air, but before he could do anything, the couplers of the snowplow and the hopper car met and closed with a hard bang, giving the engines a jolt that was harder than Bud would have hoped. Even with the speed they had been carrying, he didn’t think that the hopper cars could have moved, but now that he was hooked on, he was going to give them a fair try.

Bud transitioned the engines back to reverse, and yanked hard on the throttle. The two Geeps bellowed. Bud’s eye went to the load meter; the two engines were pulling hard, even though they weren’t at full power – the two diesels’ engines apparently didn’t like the toxic fumes much better than unprotected men would. Bud could look out the side window and see they weren’t moving. The slip alarm began to buzz.

“Well, that’s all she wrote,” he thought as he cut the power and transitioned back the other way, to see if the cars could be broken loose by pushing on them. Again, the throttle came out until the slip alarm buzzed. It was no good, no good at all. Bud reached for the whistle cord, and the Rock’s air horn bellowed a sad message to Penny and the waiting firemen.

Bud transitioned backward again as John took a mighty heave on the rope. Once again, the throttle made the two engines bellow as they backed down, the now blackened and steaming plow following behind. In his haste, Bud took the curve too fast for comfort, and he had to hit the air heavily to come to rest in the place they had left only a couple of minutes before.

John hopped off into the snow, letting the wind tear the toxic stink from his clothes before he dared to take his face mask off. Bud stayed in the cab for a moment to make sure the two engines were running before he opened both doors and left the now-stinking cab.

Linder came running up. As soon as Bud could get his face mask off, he turned to the disappointed fireman. “Couldn’t touch them, Fred. Not a chance. Not a damn chance.”

“Yeah, I could see that when you hit them going in. You really belted them, and they didn’t move an inch.”

“As much power as I had, they should have moved. Maybe the heat’s so bad in there that the wheels are welded to the track, or maybe the ties have burnt out and the rails have spread, so the wheels are sitting down in the mud. Sorry, Fred. I tried.”

“Well, yeah, but nice try, anyway,” Linder said in a disappointed tone, then added, “That was our last hope to hold off evacuating.”

“Yeah, I’m afraid you’re going to have a hell of a mess here before it’s all over with.” Bud shook his head and asked, “Anything else we can do to help?”

“Can’t think of anything right now,” Linder told him, “But don’t get out of touch. We might need something quick, and you’ve got the only direct route up here right now. I just wish the departments from Walsenberg and Spearfish Lake could get here as quick as you did, but that bridge out south of town puts us in a hell of a bind.”

Bud’s mind couldn’t help but flash on his own bridge problem for a moment while Penny asked, “How long do you think it’ll take for them to get here?”

“Walsenberg ought to be here in two or three hours, what with the snow and all, but Spearfish Lake is coming up 919 with a county plow. There’s no telling when the hell they’ll get here. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s after dark.”

Bud knew that County Road 919 wasn’t much of a road. It was something of a logging trail that wandered up hill and down dale hither and yon through the forested countryside. With the bridge out, the road from Walsenberg wasn’t much better, but at least it was shorter. “I don’t know where the hell any help is going to come from after that,” Linder added. We’re going to have to get along with just the two of them.”

“I wish there was something I could do to help,” Bud said, feeling useless. “I’ve got the railroad open to Spearfish Lake, and as long as I get right back down there, it’ll stay open. I can only plow eastward since there’s no way to turn the plow around here, but once I get back down there I can pretty well come back here when I please.”

Linder shrugged, “Well, you can’t load fire engines in boxcars.”

The idea hit Bud like a blow to the head. “No,” he agreed euphorically. There was something he could do to help! “But I can damn sure load them on flatcars,” he explained. “I’ve got a shitload of piggyback flats down in Spearfish Lake right now.”

Linder just stared in amazement as he began to comprehend Bud’s idea. “Yeah!” he said.

Bud went on, “The flats are loaded right now, but I can probably have them unloaded by the time I get back down there. If you had the Spearfish Lake department waiting for me and everything goes right, I can probably be back up here in not much over three hours. I’ve got flatcars enough that I could maybe even load on some county plows and any other heavy equipment in Spearfish Lake you think you can use.”

It was a moment before Linder shook his head and told the two railroaders, “I never in my wildest dreams ever thought about that. I’ll get right on the horn and call Spearfish Lake. What the hell are you standing around here for?”

Fred Rumsey was another worried man. He had been one of the firefighters who had held a two-and-a-half-inch inch stream of water on the smoking hopper cars while Plow Extra One had tried to drag them from the inferno of heat and smoke. Being a firefighter, Fred was fully aware of the toxic gas danger, so, even though he was a Jerusalem Paper employee and had reason to be worried for his job, at that moment, he was more worried about his wife, Marie.

The couple was due to have their first baby any day now. They had somewhat unwillingly taken a risk with this storm. Fred had wanted Marie to go and stay at his cousin’s home in Spearfish Lake, where she would be closer to the hospital, but the storm had come sooner and fiercer than expected. They were stuck in Warsaw.

More than anything else, Marie Rumsey wanted her husband with her, but since he was a fireman, he had other things to do. When Jim Horton, a village councilman, came by and said she’d have to go to the school, she really resented the fact that Fred wasn’t there to help her leave. At least she was ready – her bags were already packed for the hospital stay she had been expecting, and the ride to the school in Harry Krebsbach’s Bronco was a lot better than riding a snowmobile would have been.

Everything at the school was a nightmare for Marie. Having grown up in Warsaw, she knew everybody in the little town, and a good deal of the town was there. Virtually all of the town’s children, and most of the women and old folks were packing their way into the small school. Amid crying babies, worried adults and children who didn’t fully understand what everyone was doing at school on a day when there wasn’t supposed to be school, Marie did the best she could to get comfortable and wait for whatever might happen next.

Most of the people at the school hadn’t wanted to leave their homes, which was perfectly understandable considering the weather, but after the warning about toxic gases had been passed, the pungent smell of burning fertilizer turned irritation to hurry. While Fred Linder had been involved with the attempt to move the hopper cars and the conversation with Bud Ellsberg afterwards, the town had emptied rapidly. By now, there were few people left in town except for those who were fighting the fire or who had vitally important business there.

Most of the latter category people were Jerusalem Paper employees. The main plant at the mill wasn’t on fire yet, but with the wind, the limited firefighting equipment and the blazing embers from the pulp yard flying through the air, it might well be soon.

As soon as the danger to the building had become evident, Marshall had organized patrols of teams of employees to cover the roof and the upwind wall of the plant in hope of discovering and stopping small fires as soon as possible. Everyone knew the old, dry wooden plant would burn like mad if a fire ever got established in it.

Inside the plant itself, there were tanks and barrels of calcium bisulfate and caustic soda, not to mention other chemicals and dyes used in the paper making. If the fire got established in the main plant, many of those chemicals would be toxic, far worse than the fertilizer. Linder was more worried than most. As soon as the necessary calls to Spearfish Lake had been made he conferred with Marshall about the various chemicals. Normally, Linder was a relatively low-ranking machine operator in the plant, but his position was now much more important. The two quickly agreed that it would be better all around if the chemicals that could be moved were elsewhere.

The village snowplow driver had appeared by now, and the fire chief had him plow out a road to a small park near the broken bridge. There, a chemical dump was established, and teams of Jerusalem Paper employees got busy with the job of hauling truckload after truckload of processing chemicals out of town.

With that project under way, Linder turned his attention to what the next problem would be if the plant truly caught on fire. If that happened, the next area downwind that would be threatened would be the Northern Fertilizer Company.

About a hundred tons of fertilizer in the four hopper cars had caused Fred Linder to order the evacuation of the town. There was at least fifteen times that much at Northern Fertilizer.

“Well, maybe we at least get the chance to find out what’s wrong with this scrap heap,” Bud told his brakeman as they got up into the still-pungent smell of the Burlington’s cab, which would be forward for the westbound run. “I got the feeling on the way up that it wasn’t putting out too good.”

There was no nonsense or small talk. Bud was in a hurry. The switches were still all lined up, so Bud reached for the throttle, revving the engines up for a fast run back to Spearfish Lake. Bud didn’t have much to say anyway; he needed to think about what to say to Betty, and at first he didn’t pay a lot of attention to the green engine.

Eventually Penny caught his attention. Pointing to a gauge, he said, “You were right. This scrap heap is definitely sick.”

Bud looked at the gauge, and out the window. The going was easy; the track hadn’t had much chance to drift over since the plow’s earlier passage, but the Burlington’s speed was low for the amount of throttle Bud was using. “Be damned if it isn’t,” he mumbled finally, shaking his head and adding more throttle. “You’d think a traction motor had crapped out or something.”

“Could be,” Penny agreed.

“Well, the hell with that for right now. I’ve got to talk to Betty,” Bud said as he turned to the radio, to discover that Sheriff Joe Upton had already reached the railroad’s office, so he could talk directly.

“Don’t know why we didn’t think of calling you earlier,” Upton said. “Fred Linder said you guys made a hell of a good try on those hopper cars.”

“Yeah,” Bud replied. “But it would have been a hell of a lot better try if we could have moved them. We just couldn’t touch the damn things. Did Fred tell you what we were talking about?”

Upton said that he had. “Look,” he went on, “we can call off trying to get up 919 and send the plows out to gather up some other fire departments, but I’ve got to know if you guys can keep the line open. I mean, if we quit on 919 and you can’t keep the railroad open, we’re back where we started, except several hours behind where we should be, and maybe with the fire that much worse.”

“We’ve been up there once today,” Bud told the sheriff, “And it had snowed all night, then. We didn’t have any trouble, so the next trip shouldn’t be any problem, either. The only thing is that the plow will only plow eastward, since we don’t have any way to turn it around in Warsaw. That could make the westbound trips kind of rough, but we’re westbound right now and we’re going fine so far. I’ve got three engines available and I’ll use them all to keep the line open if I have to.”

“Fine,” Upton’s voice squawked on the VHF. “What can we do to help you get loaded up?”

Bud keyed his mike again. “Don’t know for sure yet. Let me talk with Betty. Joe, she’s gonna be awful busy, so try to help her out. Oh, hey, you might want to call the hospital and have them take some ambulances and medical people up there. They could be getting a lot of toxic gas poisoning with that fertilizer going.”

“I thought of that,” Upton replied quietly. “Here’s Betty.”

“Betty, is Walt there yet?” Bud radioed.

“He’s just getting his snowmobile suit off.”

“Tell him to put it right back on again. No, let me talk to him.”

Walt was a few moments coming to the radio, but it was a relief to hear his quiet, competent voice. “What’s the problem, Bud?”

“They’ve got a hell of a fire in Warsaw, Walt. Get the Milwaukee going and get those piggyback flats I left out on the main this morning up to the ramp. While you’re doing that, I’ll have Betty get someone out to get them unloaded. We’re going to haul the Spearfish Lake fire department up here on them. We’re passing Hoselton now, so we’re still better than an hour out. If you can have the flats loaded before we get there, so much the better. Let me talk to Betty again.”

“OK, Bud, will do.” Walt handed the microphone back to the accountant.

Knowing that everyone in the office was listening to the radio, Bud didn’t wait for her. “Betty, those flats are loaded, and the first thing to do is to do something about that. Call around town right away and find anybody with an available semi-tractor. We probably can use three or four. Try Craig Beindorf, Emil Laske, George Remmele, and maybe the Brine brothers first. They’ll probably know of anybody right close in there, too. Get Tefke and any members of the track gang you can in there to help the guys with the trucks get those trailers off the flats as soon as Walt gets them up to the ramp. Park them anywhere you can, city streets, or maybe the parking lot over behind Rick’s Café. Joe can help you with that.”

“All right. Anything else?”

Bud was a moment responding, for Penny was again pointing at the gauges. Plow Extra One’s speed was falling off slightly again. Bud shrugged and advanced the power some more, then asked Penny, “Did you plow out the piggyback ramp?”

As the brakeman shook his head, Bud turned back to the radio. “Yeah, the first person who gets there after Roger, have them take the truck and plow out the ramp. Try to have everything loaded and ready when we get there. Oh, yeah, tell Walt, that once he gets the flats up to the ramp, dig the way car out and make sure it’s left where we can couple it onto the consist we’ll take back up to Warsaw. We’re probably going to have a bunch of people to take along, and some of them can ride in it. The rest will have to ride in truck cabs or wherever. Have one of Tefke’s guys get the oil burner going in there.”

“That’s a lot to do on short notice,” she said unenthusiastically.

“Well, do the best you can. We’re almost out of range, so any questions will have to wait till we get closer. I know this is a lot to drop on you, but Warsaw’s in a bad way right now. OK, I’ve got to figure out what mechanical mystery this scrap heap is pulling on us now . . . ” Bud’s voice faded in the office radio as Plow Extra One started down the long grade into the Spearfish River swamp.

“Then after you go through this shallow rock garden, you hit this Grade III chute that’s really a corker. This peapicker is narrow and steep, and you’ve really got to paddle your butt off to make it through clean . . . ”

Joe McGuinness was an accountant who had moved from Camden to Spearfish Lake because he liked the North Country, hunting, fishing, backpacking, and whitewater canoeing. Getting fully into the drift of small town life, he had joined the fire department. Now, he was sitting in the cab of the Spearfish Lake Volunteer Fire Department’s grass truck, expounding on the rather incongruous – for the weather – subject of kayaking Quaker Rapids on the Little Spearfish River, and not realizing he was boring fellow fireman Rod Turpin to death.

Shooting the bull was about all there was to do as the fire department followed the crawling county snowplows as they wound their way up the crooked, drifted County Road 919. They weren’t even ten miles from Spearfish Lake yet, and it held the promise of being a long, dull trip. Turpin was getting a headache from looking at the flashing lights on the pumper in front of him. “Why do those jokers keep the flashers on, anyway?” he thought to himself.

The fire department had been nearly idle participants in the battle for County Road 919 for more than an hour when a call came over the radio for them. “Spearfish Lake, return to station, and bring the plow with you.”

“Now what the hell?” McGuinness said, turning to Turpin.

“Beats me. Probably they got the fire out after all,” the pulp logger replied. “Shit, we could have stayed at the bar.”

The radio crackled again as the fire chief, Harry Masterfield, responded to the base station. “Clear on that. What’s up, anyway? They got the fire out?”

“No, it’s still going,” the sheriff’s dispatcher replied. “But you guys are going for a train ride.”

Linder wanted to kick himself. There were nine loaded hoppers of fertilizer next to the Northern Fertilizer plant, and they resembled better than two hundred tons of toxic flammables that should have been gotten out of town when Plow Extra One left. He’d clean forgotten about them. Maybe the train wasn’t so far down the track that he couldn’t call them back, and there would be that much less to worry about.

No, better not, he thought. They’ve been gone half an hour now, and it’d take them at least that much time to get back here plus what they’d lose on the way back to Spearfish Lake. They ought to be able to get them out of here the next trip.

Chip Halsey was the manager of the fertilizer plant. He had once been a struggling potato farmer before he realized that the cost of fertilizer was killing him. After thinking about that, he sold his potato farm and started the fertilizer business. Now, he was a lot more prosperous and a bit more worried. When he heard about the fire, he borrowed a neighbor’s snowmobile and came in to the plant from his home out in the country.

Now, he was struggling with the threat to the plant. Linder wanted him to move all of the fertilizer out of the place, but there was no way that could be done. “We’ve only got about thirty tons of mobile capacity,” he told the fire chief. “Twenty tons of that is on spreader carts that we’d have to shovel out by hand to unload. We’ve only got two hopper trucks, and they only haul about five tons each. There’s no place where we can put the stuff around here where it’ll stay dry, and if we dump it on the ground and say the hell with it, we’ll kill fish for a hundred miles downstream next spring. And say our trucks can make one trip per hour. That’s a hundred and fifty hours.”

“We don’t have any hundred and fifty hours,” Linder grudgingly admitted. “You got any ideas?”

“Well, if we get the hopper cars out of here, that’s two hundred tons to the good. For the rest of it, if it looks like this place is going to go, maybe you can just soak it down and hope it doesn’t burn. It’ll ruin the stuff, but if we bulldoze up some kind of dike, maybe we can keep the pollution limited. If we get a big dose of this into the water table, the town’s water could be unusable for years. If we bulldozed the dike right up against the building so the wet fertilizer stays on cement, we might not spill too much.”

Linder shook his head. “With the ground frozen, Kuralt would have a hell of a time bulldozing a waterproof dike.”

“Well, yeah,” Halsey agreed. “Look, in the long run, now that the town’s evacuated, maybe it’d just be better if the stuff burns. With nobody in town, there’s not a lot downwind that can be harmed. After all, we’ve got a steel building here, and it isn’t going to catch fire easily.”

“Maybe you’ve got something there.” The fire chief was unhappy. After all, he didn’t like the thought of just letting something burn. “What all you got in there? Anything worse than what’s burning now?”

Halsey scratched his head. “Well, let’s see. What’s going now is mostly potassium nitrate. What’s mostly in the hopper cars is more potassium nitrate, di-ammonium phosphate and urea, which would give a different mix of toxic gases. There’s more of the same, pretty much, in the building, except for maybe seventy-five tons of ammonium nitrate, which we don’t use much anymore. And, I agree, we’ve got to get THAT shit out of here.”

Walt Archer was getting the Milwaukee going in the engine shed in Spearfish Lake. Ed Sloat, the retired submariner who did double duty as a brakeman and a diesel maintainer hadn’t shown up yet. In the meantime, Walt needed a brakeman, so he had Betty call over to the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank for Frank Matson. The banker often was glad to be Bud’s reserve brakeman, and with nothing much going on in the banking business in Spearfish Lake in the storm, he was glad to help when he heard what was happening. Soon, the snowmobile-suited engineer and the business-suited banker were backing the old switch engine up the north wye.

Walt knew perfectly well that he didn’t have enough power in the Milwaukee to move the whole SLWR-12 consist out of the snowbank Bud had left it in. Once they butted through the as-yet unplowed drifts on the north wye and were on the relatively clear main, Walt turned to Frank a bit sheepishly. “Look, I hate to tell you this,” he said, “But we’re going to have to break up this consist about six cars back, and the snow out there is ass deep on the Jolly Green Giant. I can hike out there and cut them off if you want to stay here. I mean, I’ve got a snowmobile suit and all.”

“Yeah, I should have thought about that,” Matson agreed. “I know it seems like chickening out, but I think I’ll take you up on that.”

The Milwaukee was almost on top of the first flatcar before Walt saw it in the blowing snow. Easing the engine forward till the couplers closed, he told the banker, “Well, don’t worry about it. We’ll get you some warm clothes when we get back up to the office. There’ll be plenty to do out there. Those damn trailers are pointed toward us, so that means we’ll have to drag them up the main, then go around the wye and get behind them to push them in. Why don’t you pump us up some train air?”

The hike wasn’t that bad for Walt; the blowing, drifting snow had cleared a narrow path on the windward side of the cars, though there were places that he had to struggle through that were waist-deep. He counted off six cars, then pulled the uncoupling lever and broke the air hose.

The trip down to uncouple the flats hadn’t been too bad, since he had been facing out of the wind. The trip back, into the wind, was something else. The snow was blowing around so wildly that he could barely see where he was going; his nose was running and his eyes were watering before he regained the windless warmth of the Milwaukee’s cab.

“Bad out there, isn’t it?” Frank commented.

“Sure the hell is,” the engineer replied. “Let’s see if we can move those things. Bud’s got a lot for us to do before he gets back.”

The old Milwaukee wasn’t that powerful, and pulling the six loaded cars out of the snowdrift was about all it could handle. It didn’t have to move the six cold, set-up cars far, just past the east wye switch. There, Walt had Frank cut the consist loose, and they backed up past the north switch, down the east wye and back up the west wye, where they coupled onto the west end of the six cars. After once again backing past the west switch, they were finally able to push the cars back up the west wye to the piggyback ramp.

During all this moving they had to throw several switches, and the banker was up and down off the Milwaukee like a yo-yo. As they headed down the west leg of the wye with the consist, he had a moment to breathe. “I’m glad we got that done,” he told Walt.

“Ain’t done yet,” Walt replied. “We’ve got to do it twice more, at least, to get the rest of those flats back together, and then we’ve got to get the way car out from behind half the odd cars in Camden.”

The Milwaukee’s crew had to feel for the piggyback ramp; they couldn’t see it in the blowing snow. Walt hit it with a pretty healthy thump. They were no sooner stopped than Walt got out of the cab to cut off the cars while Frank waded across tracks one and two to the office for a spare snowmobile suit.

In nicer weather, the two wouldn’t have been faced with a switching job quite as involved. On a dry track, the Milwaukee could have handled it with one cut. However, in the cold and the blowing snow, it was a long, slow process. Both of them had lost track of the time before they had all of the flats coupled together again, and could work at getting at the way car. Somewhere about then, Walt looked at his watch and thought to himself, Wonder where Bud is? He ought to be here by now.

Now that Spearfish Lake was out of radio range, Bud turned his attention back to the Burlington.

There was supposedly a slow order of twenty miles per hour on the track from Warsaw to Spearfish Lake, but Bud was pushing hard, and figuring that the frozen track ballast had to be pretty stable and his load was light, he was shading that figure a bit – a bit, meaning perhaps ten or twelve miles an hour. Plow Extra One was rushing for Spearfish Lake, in truth, “as fast as the wind.”

In spite of the relatively clean track from the train’s recent passage, it was taking nearly as much throttle to run downwind as it had taken to plow upwind. “You’re right,” he told Penny. “There’s something definitely wrong with this beast.”

“It’s gotta be electrical,” John replied. “I mean, the diesel itself is running about as good as it ever does. Either the generator isn’t putting out right, or something’s wrong with one or more of the motors, or something.”

Unlike trucks, diesel railroad engines aren’t direct drive, but operate from a more complicated system that allows hard pulling from a dead stop. Where a highway truck has its power sent through its transmission to its wheels, a railroad diesel drives a large generator, which in turn drives electric traction motors on each of the engine’s axles. The axles sit in suspension units, called trucks. Since electric motors have their peak torque at a dead stop, it allows the engine to get a much bigger load moving, but it does so at the expense of having a complicated system with a good many parts that can go wrong.

“Don’t think it’s the generator,” Bud replied. “We’d be seeing low amps.”

John looked out the window. The Burlington was moving along at the speed of the wind, and the snow that the engine’s apron kicked up blew along pretty much where it was. There wasn’t much for the brakeman to see out there. He didn’t like this a bit; he liked to have at least some idea of what was in front of him. What if a tree had fallen across the tracks? And besides . . .

“Bud look at that stuff,” he said, pointing at the snow cloud outside the window. “That could be what’s wrong with this thing. All that blowing snow in this cloud we’re moving in could be getting into the motors and shorting them out.”

“Could be,” Bud replied. “But those units are sealed against that kind of thing. Besides, we never have that kind of trouble any other time we’re out in snow or wet.”

“Yeah, but this is the Burlington.”

“True.” Bud was silent for a moment as he turned to look at the snow cloud that Plow Extra One was kicking up. John might have a point there. The Burlington had been having a host of electrical problems in recent months, but Bud and Sloat had more or less figured they had been unrelated. Bud mentally flipped through a history of the engine’s troubles. Not all of them could be blamed on wet electrical components, but he could think of some where that could have been a factor. A lot of those components were supposed to be sealed, but, as Penny had said, this was the Burlington.

Bud looked out the window again, then at the gauges. The green and white engine was losing still more power. “We could run harder and maybe outrun this stuff,” he told John, “but that’s getting a bit too fast for this track.”

Penny nodded. “I don’t think we could outrun it by enough to make it worth the difference.”

Bud reached for the throttle. “I hate to do this,” he said as he moved the lever. The train began to slow to a speed where the wind would blow the snow away. “It’s going to mean that it’s just that much longer before we get help to Warsaw. But I guess we’d better save this engine if we can. There’s no telling how bad we may need it before this is over.”

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