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

Chapter 12

0327 1/9/1981 – 1023 1/9/1981:
C&SL Snowplow Extra Two
Lordston Northern Extra 9608

Hours before SX-3217 was stuck in a snowdrift north of Coldwater, another lighter, lesser-powered Decatur and Overland engine, leading a train of much less power, was similarly buried behind a somewhat larger snowplow, many miles to the southwest.

Just the same, it was stuck. The combined power of the 1478 and the much smaller Camden and Spearfish Lake 303 couldn’t move themselves while coupled to the C&SL’s “little” plow.

Gene Ballard was waiting in the cab of the 303 as the loom of the 9608’s headlight materialized out of the darkness of the storm, wondering all the while what the old man would say. Ralph McPhee stopped the old Lordston Northern steam engine only a few feet behind the stranded Plow Extra Two.

McPhee didn’t say much. He climbed down from the open cab of the steamer and surveyed the situation. The plow was out of sight, and there was snow wrapped around the nose of the D&O SW9. He nodded his head and said, “Yep, Gene, you stuck her, all right.”

Ballard was relieved, in a way. He had been expecting the old man to pitch a fit. When he’d fired with him, twenty years or more ago, McPhee had been on his ass all the time. “Yeah, I’d say we backed off a little too far on that one. What do you think we ought to do now? Drain the engines and back off to Camden with the steamer?”

The old man snorted. “Why, hell no.” You ain’t that stuck. One time, years ago, we had five engines the size of the 9608 here stuck in Grant’s Cut, up t’other side of Warsaw, and we got ’em all out. We’ll back off the consist a ways and hook on the 9608 and see what happens. While we’re backing it off, clear off the tracks behind the 303.”

Ballard was convinced that the 9608 couldn’t be much help. He wanted to say something, but thought better of it. The old engine had gotten the rescue consist this far, so it obviously could do some good; and who was to say that a few more horsepower on clean tracks night not do the job? It was worth a try.

It only took the two old men a few minutes to back the rescue consist up a quarter of a mile, then return and couple on to the stranded engines. Crews returned to both the diesels, then McPhee ordered, “OK, back ’em down easy.”

The two diesels began to bark. McPhee’s experienced hands opened the throttle of the old steam engine, and steam began to fill her cylinders. The old Baldwin had been built years before the day of electronic gauging; nobody had ever dreamed of wheel slip alarms, since they hadn’t been needed. The exhaust of escaping steam and the sound of the wheels on the track were all that a halfway decent engineer had needed in those days for such things. When the wheels of the old 2-6-0 began to slip, McPhee backed off on the power, added sand, and increased the power again.

Slowly, grudgingly, the three engines began to move backward. It was only a matter of a few feet that was needed to free the engines and the plow from the grip of the snowdrift, but McPhee backed them off a hundred yards before he stopped. Again, he climbed down from the open cab of the steam engine and walked forward. Ballard came out to meet him.

“Told you so,” McPhee said.

“Damned if you weren’t right,” the younger man replied.

“Probably won’t be the last time we have to do that before we get there.”

Ballard looked back up the tracks at the snowdrift that they had just escaped from. “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “I’m wondering if we do want to go on. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of stuff like that, until we get past Thunder Lake, anyway. The wind has got the whole damn lake to pick up speed and pick up snow. Then, when the wind gets up to the tree line here, it dumps it. It’s going to be deeper than shit and windpacked, to boot. We’ve got miles ahead like that thing we just got out of, and God knows what after that. I just don’t think that we’ve got the punch that it’s going to take to do it.”

The old man thought for a moment. Ballard did have a point. There was no doubt that it was going to be hard going. But McPhee didn’t like to give up easily once he’d set his mind to a task. One quick try and giving up just as quickly didn’t count for much. “Let’s poke at her for a while yet, Gene,” he said. “I don’t think that the 1478 and the 303 have enough power and weight between them to get the plow so stuck that the 9608 can’t pull them out.”

Ballard wasn’t convinced. “That could take a hell of a long time,” he told McPhee.

“It’ll take till spring if we don’t give it a try.”

“Well,” Ballard conceded, still not convinced. “I suppose it won’t hurt to hit it a few more times to get an idea of how bad it’ll be when we really get out in the open behind the lake.”

McPhee nodded. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll ride with you in the 1478. It’ll give me a better feel for what we’re getting into. I’ll have Harold back the old girl up to give us some room.”

A few minutes later, the Baldwin had reconnected with the rescue train, and Plow Extra Two charged the drift where it had been stuck.

They gained a little ground this time. Not much; perhaps fifty yards. This time, when the nose of the 1478 was buried in snow, it wasn’t so deep that the combined power of the two diesels couldn’t back out. The snow was hard-packed by the wind here, and the plow tore it loose in chunks. A fine white power of snow enveloped the engines and the plow bit in again, for yet another fifty yards.

Ballard had the engines charge again, and again they gained some ground. For a distance, they were able to keep moving through snow that was slightly lighter, slowly giving up their speed as the encompassing snow robbed the plow train of the momentum that was carrying it through the drift.

They backed off. It seemed as if there was a chance that they might be able to get through if they just kept pecking away at it.

The next time, they charged harder, backing off well past the point where they had been stuck the first time. This time, the plow train’s charge carried them nearly a quarter mile. “See, I told you we could make it,” McPhee said.

“It’s still going to take a hell of a long time,” Ballard replied. “It’s taken us fifteen minutes to gain a half a mile or so. That’s two miles an hour.”

“That’s faster than sitting in Camden,” McPhee snorted. Ballard shrugged and signaled for yet another run at the snowdrift.

The diesels bellowed again and began their rush. The plow hit the windpacked snow, and for a hundred yards or so it pushed snow as well as it had done on the run before. Then, the snow began to thicken, and Plow Extra Two jolted to a stop.

Ballard called for reverse power. The engines just roared, and the wheel slip alarm in the 1478 began to sound. Ballard hit the sand, but this didn’t help much. “Stuck again,” he told McPhee.

The old man shrugged. “Bound to happen sooner or later. I’ll call Harold.”

Once again, the old relic from another era came forward to the stuck engines, and vindicated its existence. As the three engines backed out of the snowdrift, McPhee called his old friend on the radio and told him, “Don’t get too far away. We’ll probably need her again. It feels right good that I talked Ellsberg into letting us bring her.”

The next hour or so was brutally hard on both man and machine. McPhee was finding it hard to put up with the sudden, jolting stops and the diesels charged again and backed off again, gaining but a few hundred yards at each run in the thickly blowing and drifting snow. The next time they were stuck and waiting for a retrieve from the 9608, Ballard said to the old man, “Why don’t you stick with the Baldwin, where it’s more peaceful. I kind of think that we’ve got the hang of it.”

“I think I might take you up on that,” McPhee replied. “You’re doing all right. You got to just keep pecking away at it.”

It was a lot colder for McPhee in the familiar cab of the steamer, but the ride was better. “How’s the old girl running?” he asked Stevens.

“No problems,” his friend replied. “Guess she showed she still has something left.”

“Darn right. Ballard hasn’t said a bad word about her since we pulled him out the first time.”

“Served him right,” Stevens agreed. “Do you suppose we ought to go back and get the consist? We’ve pulled out a couple miles on it.”

“Mightn’t be a bad idea at that. How’s the water doing in this old girl, anyway?”

“It’s holding out pretty well. I went back a few minutes ago and checked the tender.”

As the engine slowly backed toward the waiting consist, McPhee got to thinking. It could easily take all day to get to Meeker, north of Thunder Lake, the nearest place ahead that they could expect to get water. True, the fire department could run a hose to the lake, cut through probably three feet of ice, and then pump up lake water. That would do if it came to it, but it was obviously a hell of a lot of work. It would be a lot easier to hook up to a hydrant in Moffat, and since the water that they had couldn’t be expected to hold out to Meeker, it might be a good idea to back up to the little town before the track snowed in behind them. McPhee called Ballard and told him the idea.

“Sounds reasonable,” Ballard replied from the 1478. “While you’re at it, see if you can come up with some sand, too. The sandbox on this thing isn’t big, and we’re using a lot.”

“I’ll try,” McPhee said. “I don’t know where we’re going to get any, or how we’re going to carry it, but I’ll see if I can come up with something. We’re going to be a while, so you be careful.”

It was only a few miles back to the little town, but it was hard going for the old Baldwin to back the relatively light load that far; the track had been snowing in behind them, and it was drifting up rapidly. It was still before dawn when the way car stopped at the crossing in the center of town.

One quick call to the town’s fire department was all that was required to get the water that was needed to fill the tender. “It’ll take us a while to get over there,” the man from the fire department responded.

“Don’t need you to come at all,” McPhee told him. “We brung our own hoses. Brung our own fire department, for that matter.”

“Fine. I really didn’t want to go out in this weather, anyway. I suppose you’ll be using the hydrant over by the lumber yard?”

“Might as well,” McPhee told him, thinking. The mention of the lumber yard gave him an idea. “Do you think you can get someone out to open up the lumberyard? We hauled a carload of mason’s sand in bags up here not all that long ago. Now, we need a couple ton ourselves.”

“I can call him,” the fireman said. “It’ll take him a while to get in. He lives out in the country, and he’ll have to ride in on his snowmobile.”

After he hung up the phone, McPhee looked at the way car, lit by one of the town’s street lights. Might as well give the passengers a break, he thought.

The last few hours had been boring for them. For the first few miles out of Camden, it had been something of a novelty to be pulled along by the old steam engine, even though they couldn’t see or hear much of it. Once the steamer had left the consist and went on to pull Plow Extra Two from the first snowdrift, it had gotten boring. As soon as McPhee appeared in the way car, Sally Keller snapped, “What are we sitting here for? I thought we were going to Warsaw?”

“Trying to, ma’am,” McPhee replied gently, but loudly enough for everyone in the car to hear. “It’s been kind of slow going for the plow train, and we’ve just been sitting back and trying to give them some room to work. We came back here to water the engine and load some sand before the track snowed in behind us. We’re going to be here for a while, until the man gets here to get us some sand. I noticed that there’s a little restaurant open across the street, so anybody that wants to can go over and get a bite. We’re going to need some help to load that sand, so when I blow the whistle on the engine, I want everybody to come back to the train, and I’ll want the men to help carry sandbags. You’ll probably have half an hour at least to get something to eat and drink.”

It was nearly an hour before a stream of men, each carrying a fifty-pound bag of sand on his shoulder – some of them carrying two – began to stagger from the lumber yard along a hundred yard path to where the train waited. In the meantime, McPhee had put some of the firemen to topping off the coal in the tender from the supply in the gondola. The sandbags were laid along one side of the gon in the space thus cleared, and were covered with a tarp to keep the sand from getting wet.

All of this was a slow process, and in the middle of it McPhee realized it had been more than an hour since he had heard from Ballard. Readily solved; he went to the 9608’s radio and called ahead to Plow Extra Two.

It proved that they weren’t doing too well. “It’s been slow,” Ballard replied. “We’ve gained maybe two or three miles since we saw you. The going is really bad, here. The snow is really packed, and we’re only getting maybe fifty yards at a crack. We don’t dare try too hard, since we don’t want to get stuck at all. We’re clean out of sand.”

“I’m a-bringin’ you some,” McPhee told him. “We got a couple ton loaded right now, and I can bring more. Best be thinking about it, since we ain’t likely to be able to back up here again.”

“Better bring all you can,” the younger man told him. “It’d be a hell of a lot better to have it and not need it than it would be to need it and not have it.”

McPhee had barely gotten off the radio when Milt Johnson, the fireman, walked up to the rear platform of the 9608. “That’s about it,” he told the old man. “And just as well. We don’t have much space left on the coal car.”

“Turns out we’re gonna need more,” McPhee replied. “Just keep on hauling it for a while. When you get that hole in the gon filled, start loading it anywhere you can. There’s mebbe some space left in the boxcars, and if we need to we can pile it on the flatcars. Have somebody bring about five or ten bags of it up here, too. We might as well top off the sand dome on this engine while we’re at it.”

Nearly six tons of sand had been loaded by the time McPhee called a halt. “That’s a hell of a lot of work in this weather,” Johnson commented.

“Couldn’t be helped,” McPhee told him. “We need the sand. How’d you like to ride up front? I’m going to have Harold and one of your people that’s been firing take a break, so they’ll be room.”

Johnson accepted immediately. He’d been aching for the invitation, for the old engine fascinated him – it’s not the kind of invitation one gets every day.

Shortly, the 9608 with the rescue train was rolling north. Johnson stood to one side as a Camden fireman shoveled coal, and McPhee peered ahead into the storm, his hand on the throttle. “Thanks for helping out back there,” the old engineer said. “Your guys did a good job.”

“Not just my guys,” Johnson commented. “Almost everybody pitched in, doctors, EMTs, those guys from Channel 8, even a couple of nurses. There’s one gal there who would grab up two bags at a time and head off like she was carrying a baby. Couldn’t get that asshole Chamberlain from Channel 3 off his dead ass, though.”

“That figures,” McPhee replied, reaching for the microphone to call ahead to Ballard. “Gene, where you at?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” the lead engineer from the plow train called. “I’d guess we’ve made a good maybe five or six miles since we got stuck the first time, but all I can see out here is snow. No mileposts or anything, so it’s anybody’s guess to be sure.”

“We’ll come up on you slow, then,” McPhee told him. “Have somebody keep an eye out behind when you’re backing.”

“Will do.”

“How’s it going now, anyway?”

“Still slow,” Ballard replied. “Still fifty yards to a run. You’ve got sand for us, right?”

“Yeah, we’ve got tons of it, in bags.”

“Good. We need it bad. We get some more bite, we can risk charging harder.”

A few minutes later, both the trains were stopped in the middle of nowhere on the western shore of Thunder Lake. Again, a line of firemen were carrying sandbags, this time to the 1478 and the 303. McPhee took the opportunity to talk to Ballard, who was changing engine crews around. For himself, he had decided that he would stay with the 1478 and to hell with the hours of service.

“This stuff is hard,” he told the older man. “We could gain ground faster if we had more power.”

“Know what you mean,” McPhee told him. “You haven’t come as far as you thought you had. We’re going to be all winter if it keeps up like this. We can try tripleheading with the 9608, only I hope Bill Lee doesn’t hear about it. Only thing is, we might get stuck so hard that we might not be able to back out, but we’ll try it a couple times and see.”

“We’ll keep the speed down,” Ballard agreed.

Now coupled together, the three engines backed the rescue consist up a quarter of a mile and charged the drifts blocking the tracks, dropping the sand as the plow bit into the drifts. Ballard was right; the snow was hard and windpacked, and the ride was terrible – but the increased power, adhesion and weight counted for a lot. Where fifty yards had been a good run before, now they gained two hundred before they finally had to back off.

They tried it again. It was a rough, jolting ride on the old museum piece of an engine and its old museum piece of an engineer. The 9608 responded differently to its throttle than the two diesels, and it was going to take some practice on the part of all concerned before the operation could be called smooth.

In the next hour, brutal though it was, they gained three miles. They were now eight miles north of Moffatt; about twelve more miles would put them past Thunder Lake. The going was expected to be easier after that.

Before long, they were too far from the rescue consist for comfort. Besides, everyone was getting tired of the battering. McPhee called for a break, and the engines backed up to where the consist was waiting. Sand was again low in all the engines, so the firemen hauled another half ton forward before the rescue train was moved ahead.

Soon, as the black of the night turned to gray, the engines were charging again. The two diesels would roar, putting out a reasonable amount of smoke and noise as they accelerated, but their commotion was minor compared to the belching of smoke, the puffing of steam, and the general roar of the old Baldwin as she filled her cylinders with steam and her huge rods shoved her drivers forcefully ahead. Perhaps the break had done everyone some good, or perhaps there was a pocket of snow that wasn’t quite as hard, but on this charge they gained nearly half a mile before they hit a harder spot and jolted to a stop again.

“A few more like that and we’ll be getting somewhere,” Ballard called over the 1478’s radio. “Let’s back ’em down.”

Levers in the three engines went to reverse, and their roar was again overpowered by the commotion from the last engine – but the wheel slip indicators in the diesels and panting exhaust and squealing wheels from the steam engine showed that even with sand, there was no movement. “Shut ’em down,” Ballard called. “We’re stuck.”

The engines quieted. McPhee leaned out of the cab window of the 9608 to see what was going on. Beyond the 303, he could see the nose of the red and white engine nearly buried in the snow.

“You sure are,” he radioed Ballard. “I swear, you’ve got snow clean up over the nose of that thing.”

“What do you think we ought to do?” the younger man asked.

“Don’t think I’m so stuck that I can’t get this old girl out,” McPhee radioed. “If one of the guys from the 303 will uncouple us, I’ll go back and get the consist.”

“What good is that going to do?”

“The Red Cross loaded a whole bunch of snow shovels into one of the boxcars,” McPhee replied. “Thought it was kind of stupid at the time. Don’t think so now.”

With a liberal application of sand and without the drag of the two diesels, the old steam engine backed clear, and kept on moving the nearly three quarters of a mile to where they had left the rescue consist only a few minutes before, and brought it forward to the stalled plow train.

“Roust ’em all out,” McPhee told the fire marshal. “Make sure that goddamn Chamberlain is out there, too. Tell him that if he doesn’t get his ass out there, we’ll leave him here.”

“A pleasure,” Johnson replied, a smile on his face.

Johnson’s crew filtered forward a minute or two later. It is a little hard for the mind to picture just how much snow that they had to move. The 1478 wasn’t that buried; it was just necessary to shovel her running boards clear, dig down to the level of her trucks, and get some of the load off of the plow. McPhee was sure that it wouldn’t be necessary to dig her completely out; once some of the load was off of the engine, the available power ought to be able to pull out of the snowdrift.

But even small switch engines are fairly large objects. There were places where it was necessary to dig down twelve feet to get to the bottom of the snow that surrounded the engine, and the plow was buried even deeper. The light wasn’t that good to work by in the blowing snow, but at least there was no problem with finding a place to dig, for there were only about forty people, and tons of snow had to be moved.

Stevens came up to the 9608 to relieve McPhee from his watch on the old steamer, and McPhee walked forward to check on the progress of the digging. It wasn’t going very quickly, and it would be a while yet before it would be worth the trouble try to move the 1478 and the plow again. He noticed Milt Johnson standing over the protesting anchorman. Probably the only useful work he’s ever done, the old man thought, and turned to go back to the way car.

The way car was all but empty. He turned to leave, but noticed Sally Keller sitting at a window, staring out at nothing in particular. “Why ain’t you helping?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t be any good at shoveling snow,” she replied. “I’d like to help, but there doesn’t seem to be anything for me to do.”

“Use your head,” McPhee snapped. “They’re going to be mighty cold when they get done. Hot coffee would do them a lot of good, and if you didn’t include coffee and cups in your relief supplies, you sure goofed up.”

He walked back to the front of the train through the narrow alley that the snowplow had left, inspecting the cars. Everything on the flatcars seemed to be riding all right, but there was bagged sand stacked all over the place. It wouldn’t do too well to take out slack too hard, sometime, or there would be just plain sand all over the place. But that might not matter, since at the rate they were using sand, they might need more when they got to Meeker. He walked back past the softly hissing old Baldwin, and saw that the work was progressing a bit. Ballard was in the cab of the 1478; he’d been out clearing snow off the running boards when McPhee was up there earlier. The engine seemed to be idling all right, but McPhee asked about its health, anyway.

“Well, being stuck nose first into that drift obviously isn’t going to help this thing any,” Ballard replied. “But for the moment it still seems to be working. Do you think we’ve got enough snow moved to try taking a strain yet?”

“Don’t know for sure, yet,” McPhee told him. “Could try and see, but it won’t hurt to let them dig for another ten minutes or so, say. I’ll back up the consist so we’ve got some room to work.

As it turned out, ten more minutes was barely enough. The deep snow banks surrounding the stalled engines and the 9608 had people standing all over them as the diesels powered up and the old steamer, on a pre-sanded track, belched black coal smoke into the snowstorm and panted steam, at the limits of her safety valve.

They moved. At first, they just barely moved, but once the grip of the snow was first broken, they kept moving. Over the steam and diesel racket, McPhee could hear cheers.

In a few minutes more, McPhee had brought the cars forward once again so that the victorious shovelers could be loaded, then backed up once again so that there’d be room to work.

While they were loading, Ballard appeared in the open cab of the 2-6-0. “After that,” he said, “I’d be about ready to call it a day,” he told McPhee.

“Can’t now,” the older man replied. “It’s been long enough that I don’t think that we could back to Moffat, even with three engines. We maybe could, but we might get into worse trouble. The only way out is straight ahead.”

So the engines charged straight ahead again, gently at first in hopes of not getting stuck in the big drift again. It was back to not gaining much ground with each run at the encompassing snow; a good one might gain them fifty yards. Finally, the snow eased off a bit, and McPhee felt justified to do some harder charging.

They made some progress the next hour, savage though that hour was. McPhee felt they might have gone as much as four miles in that hour, but when they went back to pick up the consist it proved to only be a little under three. But they were gaining ground; about seven more miles would put them past Thunder Lake.

They went back at it. Back off and charge: seventy-five yards.

Back off and charge: a hundred and eighty, perhaps two hundred yards.

Back off and charge: with the old Baldwin panting and chuffing as if her life depended on it, through somewhat easier snow, a quarter of a mile or so.

Back off and charge: windpacked drift, fifty yards.

Back off and charge: same windpacked drift, about the same gain.

Back off and charge: ditto.

Back off and charge: starting to break through, now. Eighty or a hundred yards.

Back off and charge: some ground gained, very reluctantly, but the three engines managed to keep going for a while. Hard to say how far; too much throttle jockeying to pay much attention. Could be two hundred yards, or three, or four.

Back off and charge: again, and again, and again. The going now was the hardest they had yet seen, but they weren’t getting stuck. They broke off for a rest, brought the consist forward, then went back to hitting the wind-packed snow again.

By midmorning, there wasn’t much of Thunder Lake left to get past, but in their eight-hour struggle, they had managed to cover ground at something under two miles an hour. Once they got to Meeker, a few miles past the end of the lake, they’d be nearly halfway to Spearfish Lake and a third of the way to Warsaw. By the time they made Spearfish Lake, perhaps Ellsberg with the two big Geeps and the big plow would have the track from there to Warsaw open to the point where that part would be easy.

Another hour went by, another long, desperate hour of charging the unrelenting snowdrifts, then charging them again. Finally, there came a run where they could keep going for a while through lighter snow.

As the engines backed up yet again, McPhee could see a fairly dense forest off to their left. “Been a long time since I’ve been up this way,” he radioed, “But if them trees is where I think they are, we’re done with the lake.”

There was no need to listen for a reply on the radio, for two diesel air horns belched and burped as they cleared snow out of their throats as the diesel engineers cheered to the woods in their own way. There was cheering in the way car, too, for there was a large group of people gathered around the radio there, trying to make out from the taciturn comments that occasionally came over it how the plow train’s progress was going.

“I suppose we ought to go back for the consist,” Ballard replied when the cheering died out. “It’s been a while since I’ve been up here, too, and I’m not sure I remember what comes next.”

“Through the woods for a mile or so, so it mightn’t be too bad,” McPhee radioed back. “Then up onto a raised grade for a mile or so. Then, about a mile south of Meeker, there’s a cut that scares me, judging on what we’ve seen so far.”

Once the rescue consist had been parked in the forest at the end of the lake, the engines charged the snow again. The going was harder than McPhee had expected for the first mile, but nowhere as hard as the previous eight hours had been. Only three runs were necessary to get them through the first mile, and on the last run they got out onto the fill, where rails could actually be seen through the snow – although not very well, and only in a brief glimpse over the plow from the cab of the leading engine.

It felt so good to be able to move freely that they got a little carried away. They were on top of the bad cut south of Meeker that McPhee had feared before they knew it. To be honest, McPhee rarely got up this way, and was a little unsure anymore about where everything was located; besides, it was hard to tell just where in that cedar swamp they were.

As a result, the snow got deeper on them in a hurry, for they were really storming along when they reached the cut. The momentum of the train carried them deeply into it, and their speed fell off rapidly. This was the deepest snow that they had yet seen; it flowed around and over the plow, up onto the running boards of the 1478 and over its nose, and even then their speed didn’t slow to a stop. By the time Plow Extra Two was dragged to a halt, the little 44-ton GE was half buried and the nose of the Baldwin was uncomfortably deep in the drift.

There was a relative silence for a moment, then Ballard’s voice came onto the radio. “Everybody all right?”

The 303’s crew reported themselves all right, followed by McPhee, who said, “Sorry, Gene. We come up on that one a little faster than I thought we would.”

“It’s pointless to even try and move this thing,” Ballard replied. “Ralph, why don’t you go back and get the consist again?”

“Got to dig out the uncoupling lever on this thing, first,” he said into the microphone. “Unless someone from the 303 can reach it easier.”

“The front door’s a lost cause,” a voice replied from the middle engine, “But I think we stand a chance at the back door.”

It took several minutes to get down to the couplers in the deep snow, since the only shovels that happened to be with the engines were three coal scoops lying in the 9608’s tender. In a few minutes the diesel crews gathered on the little GE to watch the old 2-6-0 pull out. McPhee shot sand to the drivers, opened the throttle gently, then more forcefully. Even the diesel men knew enough about steam to tell from the rapid chuf-chuf-chuf of escaping steam that the engine was slipping her drivers.

It took McPhee only a few seconds to realize that the cause was hopeless.

Ballard shook his head. “What do we do now?” he asked himself. “There’s only three shovels and six of us, since we can’t count on Ralph for any shoveling. And the consist is back there a good two miles.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.