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

Chapter 6

2135 1/8/1981 – 0321 1/9/1981:
Decatur & Overland Snowplow Extra 3217

The Camden and Spearfish Lake wasn’t the only railroad having problems with snow on that January night. More than a hundred miles to the south of the little town of Warsaw, the Decatur and Overland was in the midst of their own battle with the storm.

The storm hadn’t been quite as bad to the south of Camden, and it takes a lot of snow to stop a railroad anyway. A local newscaster, Nathan Chamberlain, had learned that: he had done a stand-upper in the storm, live for the six o’clock report, saying that the whole town was plugged up and nothing was moving, only to have a D&O freight with five red and white road units on point go whistling through the background. The D&O’s through freights were still running, even though, admittedly, they usually were running late.

To get the freights through took extra power in the face of the hard-driven snow. Fortunately, many local industries had shut down, and it was possible to cancel some way freights and still have a little power left over to run snowplow extras on the major routes.

At Putnam Yard, the D&O’s big central division facility south of Camden, movements were slow, since many of the wheeled vehicles that normally serviced trains couldn’t make it through the snow. Many of the yard workers had brought their own snowmobiles to work; with them, the yardmaster was managing to keep some degree of order to Putnam’s movements.

Still, the Decatur and Overland was a northern railroad, and such things were to be expected in winter.

Frustrating though these times were to normal operations, Steve Cziller enjoyed them nonetheless. He was entranced by the drama of trying to run the railroad through the storm’s challenges. He recently had been promoted to road foreman; in his mid-thirties, he had already held a lot of different jobs in his rise through the railroad’s hierarchy. Until recently, he’d been a conductor on the railroad’s Decatur division; his new position was something of a transition to a management level, and with his broad and varied experience, he was clearly earmarked for higher things.

Right at the moment, he was inspecting some work that was being done on the tired trucks of an F-unit that was older than he was, trying to figure out if there was any chance of its being used tonight. It didn’t look good.

“Hey, Steve,” a voice called from the door of the shop office. “The super wants to see you right away!”

“Jeez, what’s he doing, still here?” Cziller asked to no one in particular, then realizing he’d have to find out for himself.

In a few minutes, Cziller was brushing the snow off of himself in the lobby of the administration building, prior to climbing the three flights of stairs to the division superintendent’s office.

“Hi, Les,” he said, “What’s up?”

Les Marks got right to the point. “You like challenges, don’t you? I’ve got one, if you’re interested.”

“Might be,” he replied, curious. “You never can tell.”

“I just had a call from Bud Ellsberg,” Marks said. “You know him?” Cziller shook his head, and Marks continued, “There’s a hell of a fire burning up in Warsaw, up on the Camden and Spearfish Lake. It used to be our Spearfish Lake subdivision of the D&O. You know it?”

“I’ve been all over it,” Cziller replied. “When I was a brakeman, I made all sorts of runs up the Spearfish Lake and Rochester subdivisions. I used to hunt deer up around there, too. That was maybe ten years ago, though.”

“Things have changed a lot in ten years,” Marks said. “The Spearfish Lake subdivision is now the Camden and Spearfish Lake. It’s a little, one-horse shortline with a handful of engines that are older than God. They’ve been trying to keep the line open from Spearfish Lake to Warsaw so they can haul in fire departments and rescue people, and they’ve already had one engine die on them. Ellsberg – he’s the honcho up there – called me up a few minutes ago and asked us to run some power up to him on our Kremmling branch, over on the Rochester subdivision. With the Marshall drawbridge out, that’s the only other way onto his iron. Now, the Kremmling branch has been embargoed for dogs’ years, but in the morning, I’m going to call Decatur and ask them to let us give it a try. Ellsberg has a pretty good argument, and I think they’ll buy it.”

Cziller studied the map on Mark’s wall. The Rochester subdivision had once been much longer, but in the past several years lower-quality parts of it had been abandoned. Once the rails had run north from Atlanta, forty miles east of Putnam, to Lordston. From there, they ran around Haley Lake to Haleyville, then north to Whiteport and Kremmling and finally Walsenberg.

Things had changed. These days, D&O trains left the old route at Lordston and ran down the North Central Railroad branch to Coldwater, then up the old D&O Rochester branch until rejoining the old route at Whiteport. The roundabout route got to most of the old customers, at the expense of half again the distance to cover.

The NCRR branch once had run on to Meeker, but it had been pulled up past Frontier, as had the old D&O Coldwater branch a few miles south of town. The section between Lordston and Whiteport was still in place, but owned by the Lordston Northern, a little steam tourist operation, and the north part of it was unusable due to a grade that had been washed out in a storm a few years before.

“What is it you want me to do?” Cziller asked.

Marks smiled. “I’m assuming Decatur will approve, and I want us to get a running start. If that fire keeps going, Ellsberg is going to be in real trouble by the time we can get there. His people – including himself – are all hoglawed, but they’re pushing on, anyway. Lord knows how long his machinery can hold out, so it’s worth it to push ahead. I need someone in charge of the rescue train who won’t give up at the first sign of trouble. We’d look like shit if we made a weak attempt and gave up, and it turns out we were needed bad. Can you handle it?”

“The guy who blows it is going to look like shit,” Cziller replied. “If I can take equipment that isn’t pure junk, I’ll give it my best shot. No promises, though.”

“That could cause problems,” Marks told him. “The Kremmling branch is in real sad shape. The C&SL isn’t exactly a high-iron main line, either. Ellsberg and I agreed that we don’t dare use any really heavy units. I thought about maybe taking the F-7 set we’ve been using on the plow trains.”

“That won’t hack it,” Cziller replied. “I was just down at the power shop. Those old covered wagons are down for the count. If I’m going to give this a try, we’ve got to take some good power. How about some of those GP-9 rebuilds we’ve been using on the way freights? They’re light.”

“I’ll leave that up to you and the dispatcher,” Marks brushed off. “You can take the best around that’s suitable. I want you to get organized and get going as soon as you can. I’d say that you want to take two full crews, a couple of diesel maintainers, and a shitload of spare parts.”

“With all that bad track, maybe we ought to take some section workers, too.”

“Good thought. Make sure you take enough food and stove fuel in case you get stuck somewhere and we can’t get to you until the storm is over. We had a run down here from Rochester yesterday, so the track shouldn’t be too bad that far. After that, you’ll have your hands full.”

Cziller’s next stop was in the dispatcher’s office. The dispatcher, John Desmond, was notoriously tight with power. “I could let you have that F-7 set that’s over in the power shop,” he told Cziller.

“I just went around with Marks about that. Those old covered wagons won’t get out of the yard under their own power. We’ve got to have good power. We were talking about some of those rebuilt GP-9s.”

“You think I’ve got power to piss away, in this storm? I’ve even got switch engines on road runs and you want to eat high off the hog! Damn it, I’ll talk to Marks myself about this!” He stomped off to his private office and slammed the door.

A couple minutes later he was back, somewhat more subdued. Maybe he did call Marks, Cziller thought. Desmond studied the power assignment board for a moment, then said, “Look, we’ve got 3217 and 3259 coming in on DPY-A in an hour or so. They’re GP-9s. I can let you have one of them.”

“One stinking engine isn’t going to help those people in Warsaw much,” Cziller replied heatedly. “I heard on the radio, and I heard from Marks, that they’re running with their backs to the wall, trying to keep a bunch of castoff old junk running to save the town, and all you can say is one Geep. How about both the Geeps and the F-unit set?”

“Oh, all right,” Desmond surrendered. “Take both the Geeps. I can’t let you have the Fs, too. I’ve got to have something to send out on Dippy-A, sick trucks or no sick trucks. It’s got three SD-38s, and that ain’t enough. What else you want?”

“I’m taking an extra crew and some other people, so I’ll need two crummies. I need them earmarked now, so I can get them loaded with tools and supplies.”

“Way cars, I got a lot of, especially with the way freights not running. Take, uh . . . ” Desmond glanced at the availability board again “ . . . 14039 and 14071.”

“How about a plow? I need the biggest one I can get my hands on.”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” Desmond replied. “All the big plows are out on plow trains.”

Cziller needed a healthy plow or the job was over before it started. “We’ve got a seventy miles of track that hasn’t been plowed all winter. Pilot blades are not going to cut it – we need something that can move snow. Is there anything coming in in the next few hours that we can get?”

Despite his surly manner and tightness with equipment, Desmond really wanted to help. “Well, there is one thing, and it’s right here in the yard, but it’s up to you if you want it.”

“What’s that?”

“A few years ago, the car shop rigged up a rotary plow. They thought it would be good to clean out cuts and the like. We don’t use it much; haven’t used it yet this winter at all. You can’t go real fast with it, but in really deep shit on light rail, it’s the way to go. It throws snow like something you’ve never seen.”

Cziller brightened. “Something like those out west, powered by traction motors off a B-unit generator?”

“Naw, it’s nothing that elaborate. This is strictly homegrown. Just a great, big snowblower, powered direct drive from a D-8 Caterpillar diesel. I’ll have the yardmaster dig it out of the dead line for you.”

There was something there that didn’t sound too good to Cziller. Despite Desmond’s sales talk, there was a warning in his tone of voice. “I still want a blade,” Cziller said, “But I’ll take a look at it.”

Cziller went over to the crew calling office to arrange for volunteer crews, and it took a while. By the time he got back to the power shop, the rotary plow had been pulled inside and a small crew was working on it.

From a distance, the plow looked brutally effective. Closer up, its homemade genesis became apparent. In the remote past, it had been a forty-foot boxcar, but the old box had been shortened and its roof lowered. It now housed a bulldozer engine, driving a blade that looked like a giant fan. On top sat a cupola for the operator, not that he had much to control beside the engine’s speed and the moveable steel chute that could control the direction the snow was thrown.

A great big snowblower, to be sure; Cziller had used one of a normal size a few hours earlier to clean out his driveway. Somehow, though, this obviously cobbled-up monstrosity inspired even less confidence than if he had planned to take his home snowblower in the front of the plow train.

“Ugly bastard,” he said to the man who seemed to be in charge of servicing the plow. “I wonder how many wrecks it took to get parts for it.”

“Quite a few,” the man admitted. “She’s not pretty, but she does move snow. And she’s strong. I know. I helped build her.”

“You going with us on the rescue train?”

“Sure am. The name’s Spike Hottel.”

“Spike, are you real sure that thing is going to keep running for maybe a couple hundred miles?”

Hottel scratched his head. “It ought to. They haven’t used it enough to keep everything loose. Its real problem is that it’s under-powered. We wanted to build it out of a wrecked switcher, but that fell through. The Cat is a second best. Everybody has always wanted to push it too hard through deep stuff, and the engine bogs down. It’ll go pretty good through light stuff, but in the really deep stuff, you’ve got to take your time.”

“Glad to have you along,” Cziller replied. “It’ll be good to have someone who knows something about it.”

Cziller assembled his crew in the second of the two cabooses while they were awaiting the arrival of their motive power off of DPY-A. The last hour had been hectic, with people coming and going all over the place. In that time he had managed to arrange for the train and to man it, get the food, fuel, and tools that he wanted stored on board. All the promised people had shown up. There were now fifteen people in the car; two engineers, two conductors, four brakemen, two mechanics, four section workers and himself. Now that he had them all together, he felt that he ought to say something about the job ahead.

“There’s a lot riding on this train,” he began. “I don’t know much about the situation in the little town up there, but I do know they need us bad. I want to get through, but I don’t want any of us killing ourselves to do it. We’re going to press along steadily and change crews every eight hours. Either Spike, here, or Dean will run the plow, and they’ll have to fill in as diesel maintainers if something goes wrong. Tom,” he said to one of the conductors, “I want you and Harry to take the first trick, and Johnny and Jim the second. Brakeman, two of you on each shift, but we won’t be doing much switching, if any, until we get there. You section guys are mostly along for the ride unless we’ve got to do some track work or something. We’ll work the train and live out of this crummy and we’ll keep the other one for the guys who are trying to sleep. Any questions?”

“Yeah,” Conductor Johnny Detar asked. “Do we have to take that stupid rotary? A blade could plow rings around it.”

Before Hottel could rise to defend his creation, Cziller replied, “It was the best the yard could come up with on short notice. We’ll have to make do. When we get up to Rochester, we may be real glad we’ve got it.”

Before any questions could be asked, the yardmaster’s voice came over the caboose’s radio: “SX-3217, your power’s ready and fueled on L-4 South. If you get right out of here, we’ll put you out in front of Dippy-A.”

“First trick, that’s you,” Cziller said.

It was well that the first shift crew hurried. With the low power on the through freight, it would be slow. Running light, SX-3217 a few minutes ahead could run fast the forty or so miles to Atlanta.

They didn’t get far before snow began to pile up in front of the plow. It was light, but was slowing progress. Hottel climbed through the two cabooses and up the running boards of the two engines and onto the plow while the train was moving. Once in the plow’s cab, he started it up. Even at an idle, it threw the relatively light accumulation of snow far off the tracks.

It promised to be a slow, dull trip. The other mechanic, Dean Pickering, and most of the second shift headed for the first caboose and a nap. The section workers started a poker game, which Detar and the rear-end brakeman joined. Cziller climbed to the cupola of the way car, where he watched what he could of the miles rolling by in the thick, blowing snow and the darkness. He was joined there by the second trick brakeman, Bruce Page, who apparently didn’t like poker.

As the caboose rocked through the night down the well-traveled main line, the road foreman and the junior brakeman talked about hunting, fishing, football, hockey, and other such railroad-oriented topics. Page was something of a curious character to Cziller, since he seemed better educated and more sensitive than the average young railroader. This appealed to Steve, who had dropped out of college to do something more interesting. It soon proved that this described Page, as well.

“Seems to me a bright young guy like you would have wanted to stay in college, rather than mess around with railroads,” Cziller remarked to his companion.

“I don’t know,” the young man replied. “When I was in high school, I wanted to be an artist. Then, when I got to college, I found out there were people there with real talent. It all seemed so unreal. I come from a railroad family, and railroads seemed real. Then I broke up with this girl, and I just didn’t want to stay around college anymore. My dad was an old New York Central man, and Conrail isn’t doing any hiring, of course, but I did manage to wind up here.”

“How do you like the Dirty and Old?” Cziller asked.

“Oh, it’s all right, I guess. I really don’t know anybody in Camden, so it gets kind of lonely at times. I’m not much for watching TV or hanging around bars. It makes me wish I hadn’t broken up with Barb.”

“Are you planning on staying with the D&O?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess it kind of depends. I suppose that if I could get a job with Conrail out of Buffalo, well, that would take me home. But I’m starting to get enough seniority here to get regular calls now, and if I changed I’d have to start all over at the bottom of the ladder. But hell, I don’t know if I want to stay with railroading. I just guess that if I had Barb or somebody with me, I’d feel better.” The tall young man with the short blond hair shook his head, but Cziller couldn’t see it in the dark. “I mean, I like this part of the country, and all. I guess I’m going to have to think about it sometime.”

“I know where you’re coming from,” Cziller replied. “I kicked around this old streak of rust for years without anything much in mind until I got married and decided to go somewhere with it. I just kind of decided that I didn’t want to be a brakeman all my life, so I knuckled down. It’s turned into a damn good job.”

“Yeah, but you’re married,” Page replied. “That makes a difference. I don’t even know any girls to call up for a date.”

It took some digging to uncover the switch at Atlanta enough to throw it. SX-3217 had pulled out a big lead on DPY-A by this time, so there was some time to dig without slowing the following high-priority freight.

While the front-end brakeman dug, Cziller left the way car and walked up to the 3217, the point engine. “Got room for one more?” he asked Harry Anson, the engineer.

“Sure do,” Anson replied. “Tom was just saying he thought he’d ride in back for a while. He heard there’s a pretty good poker game going back in the second crummy.”

“Seemed like it to me,” Cziller smiled. “How’d the plow work? From what little I could see, it seemed like it was putting out pretty good.”

“Guess so,” Anson agreed. “I probably didn’t see much more than you did. I just motored along and let Spike adjust his speed to suit. We talked about it on the radio for a while. When the snow gets worse, he’s just going to have to keep going at full power, and I’ll adjust my speed to whatever the plow can put out.”

“Good enough. I want to see what happens in the deeper stuff.”

Once the tail of the train cleared the switch and it was thrown back to the main, the conductor, Tom Bigelow, climbed into the way car and called over the radio, “OK, Harry, get her moving.” A moment later, the other radio in the engine squawked with a more formal report over the VHF repeaters to Putnam Yard, “SX-3217 is clear of the main at Atlanta at 0021.”

Putnam responded, “SX-3217, proceed at your best speed to Kremmling. Do not pass Kremmling without further orders. Attempt contact by radio or land line at Lordston, Coldwater, Rochester, and Kremmling.”

Up in the 3217’s cab, Cziller drawled, “OK, Harry, you heard the man.”

Anson reached for the microphone of the yard radio. Where they were now, and where they were going, there would be no other units in range of the repeaterless yard frequency, so they could talk freely without resorting to formal procedures or call signs. “OK, Spike, power up,” he called.

SX-3217’s whistle howled, and the snowplow extra moved north.

The snow was deeper out on the tracks to Lordston, but since a plowless train had made it down from Rochester the day before, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The track set generally across the direction of the storm’s wind as it wound through the scrub forests and occasional hardscrabble farms, and there were places in deeper cuts and behind rows of trees where it was fairly deep. The train was only a couple miles past the industrial part of Atlanta before Hottel called for a speed reduction.

Anson pulled the power back, and the roar of the two GP-9s became more muted. Cziller moved to one side of the cab of the highnose Geep to get a better view of what the plow was doing. The roar of the big Caterpillar engine of the plow began to be heard in the cab. Cziller could see the plume of snow on the downwind side of the track begin to thicken as the rotary bit into the deep drift and hurled it off into the pine woods.

Cziller looked down. The plow was chewing through perhaps four feet of snow and it didn’t seem to be straining too much. It was a long way to Warsaw, but if they could hold this speed they ought to be there sometime after noon, but he didn’t think there was much hope of being able to hold speed. They might be able to go faster on the NCRR tracks the D&O ran over on trackage rights, since the track lay east and west and might not drift up much. Balancing that, north of Rochester the going was guaranteed to be hard.

The foreman spent much of the time leaning up against the right cab window of the Geep, watching the rotary throw snow. Hottel kept complaining that the diesel was being dragged down too much and kept calling for speed reductions. Cziller could do nothing but agree. “We’ll just have to take what we can get and like it,” he told the engineer. “We crowd that thing too much and it might crap out.”

There wasn’t much for Cziller to do for the next couple hours as SX-3217 crawled north. The speed was slow, for the snow was fairly deep. But the speed was acceptable under the circumstances.

Eventually they reached Lordston. Here, the branch they had been following continued north, but as a part of the Lordston Northern. They had to dig out the switch to the North Central tracks. While the duty brakeman dug at the suspected location and the duty conductor searched for a phone to call Putnam Yard, Anson told Cziller about the little tourist operation. “That old steamer they’ve got is something. That guy Lee found it in a park somewhere, and spent years rebuilding it. They’ve got kind of a happy little operation there,” he said, pointing at the Lordston Northern office and engine shed, lost just across the main in the darkness and blowing snow. “They take a little freight up to Haleyville now and then, then they’ve got this S-1 Alco to haul freight and fill in when the steam engine isn’t running, which isn’t a lot of the time. The whole operation is really different – even the Alco’s engineer.”

Cziller was bored with the conversation. He really couldn’t care less about the Lordston Northern or how different it might be. “Look,” he told the engineer. “I think I’m going to go back and ride in the way car for a while. I’ll grab something to eat and maybe sleep a little. Give me a call on the radio when we get to Coldwater or if something goes wrong.”

The way car was a little quieter than it had been earlier in the trip. Once they were moving, Cziller climbed up in the cupola to see what he could see. In the dark and blowing snow, it was rather like trying to plow snow inside of a cow. There was nothing to see and nothing to be heard, except for occasional statements like, “I’ll see that, you son of a bitch.”

A sandwich and a cup of coffee satisfied him. He decided to ride in the other way car. Perhaps he could sleep; at least, he would be away from the poker game.

In the quiet darkness of the first way car, he could tell a little more about the train’s progress. Apparently the speed was up; he must have guessed right about the snow on the North Central tracks, and the plow had to be working all right. He tried to sleep, wishing that he’d stayed in the 3217.

In fact, Cziller did sleep a little. Some unknowable time later, the train came to a stop, and that woke him up.

He got up and looked around, but still there was nothing to be seen. Either they’d gotten to Coldwater and were digging for the next switch, or there had been trouble. Why hadn’t Anson called?

With a start he came fully awake. He hadn’t been called because someone had turned off both radios in the way car. His feet hit the floor as he headed for the 3217.

Once at the plow, he asked, “All right, what happened?”

“It started shaking real bad,” Hottel told him, “So I had to shut it down. Once we got stopped, I kind of figured we might have thrown a balance weight, and sure as hell, look at that.” He pointed a flashlight off to one edge of the front blade of the plow. There it was – a place, out near the edge of the blade, where there had obviously been some piece of metal spot-welded. At the speed the plow had to have been running, it had to have been a hell of a vibration.

“What happened to the weight?”

Hottel pointed vaguely to the south. “It’s got to be out there, somewhere.”

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