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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
Chapter 14
0737 1/9/1981 – 1222 1/9/1981:
Decatur & Overland Snowplow Extra 3217
Lordston Northern Extra 451
It was nearing dawn when the phone rang in the office of the Lordston Northern. Diane Lee looked up from her bookkeeping and answered it.
The caller proved to be Spike Hottel, out in the engine shed. “We got lucky, Miss Lee,” he said. “The blade balanced right up. We’re ready to go whenever you get someone over here to run your Alco.”
“It’ll only be a few minutes,” she said.
Sure enough, within a few minutes, the Alco’s air horn sounded outside the door of the engine shed. Hottel opened the door, and Pickering motioned it slowly forward, until its coupler closed on that of the plow. The diesel’s engineer backed the snowplow out into the storm, and the two D&O mechanics closed the door, turned out the lights, and walked the few yards up the track to where the engine and plow sat waiting. As soon as they had climbed onto the engine, it began to back up toward the switch to the main line, lost a couple of hundred yards away in the blowing snow. The two mechanics listened to the lightweight, six-cylinder sound of the old switch engine, then went into the cab.
The Alco only had to back up a short distance past the crossovers of the North Central tracks before it had to stop at the first of two switches. Now, the engineer spoke for the first time: “Well, are you going to throw the switch, or am I going to have to?”
Hottel would have been less shocked if there had been no engineer at all. “Miss Lee!” he exclaimed, “I didn’t know you was running this thing.”
“Who else?” she said. “After all, this is my engine. Why shouldn’t I run it?”
In the dim light of the cab, Hottel could see that the wool skirt she had worn earlier had been exchanged for a snowmobile suit. “You sure you know how to run this thing?” he asked.
“Look, Mr. Hottel,” she replied icily, “Not only do I run this engine every day, I did a big share of the work rebuilding it. Dad hardly ever runs it. He’s too mixed up with the steamer, so I make the freight runs. I even painted it the color I wanted to.”
Hottel reflected that the deep orange engine matched the color of her hair. “I suppose you run the steamer, too,” he replied with a sense of awe.
“I can run it, and I can fire it. I’m not that good at it, but I’ve had to do it. This is a family operation, and that means just Dad and me a lot of the time. Now, is somebody going to throw that switch, or are we going to have to sit here all day?”
Hottel shouldn’t have been that surprised. There were getting to be more women railroad workers around in operating departments, although they were still rare. As in everything else, though, the Lordston Northern was something special.
In reality, Bill Lee hadn’t expected that Diane would claim the diesel for her own when he bought it, but he should have been prepared for it after the example he had set with his love affair with the old Baldwin.
He hadn’t had the time to spend years rebuilding the diesel, as he had with the old 2-6-0, but it hadn’t needed it as badly. The diesel was shopworn but runnable when they had first acquired it, but in the subsequent years they had gone through the engine the best they could. Their best had proved to be pretty good.
Diane was a shy, demure girl, but the Alco had brought out a hitherto secret talent for things mechanical, and her delight in working on the engine developed into a positive passion for running it. In the early days, it had to be used on tourist trips. While Bill had often had to spend the days trying to revive the old steamer, his daughter would take the excursion trips with the rust-colored engine. Somehow, it hadn’t seemed inappropriate to the passengers to have the quiet little girl running the diesel – nowhere near as inappropriate as it seemed on the odd occasions that she took a coal shovel to the steamer.
Hearing that Diane knew how to run the Alco and depending on it were two different things to Hottel, but there wasn’t much he could do but like it. “Dean,” he asked, “Are you going to throw that switch, or do I have to?”
“I’ll do it,” Pickering replied. “I guess I’d better ride up in the plow. If there’s any snow accumulated on the tracks, we’ll have to run it.”
The going was easy for the first several miles, and Pickering didn’t have to start the plow. The Alco took them right up to thirty, which was a comfortable speed on the decaying old North Central branch. “Comfortable” was relative; the engine rocked and rolled, while Spike and Diane held on. “I didn’t realize the track over this way had gotten this bad,” she remarked after a particularly bad bounce.
Pickering started up the plow a few miles out. Even with it running, Diane was able to keep her speed up. The Alco roared through the black of the snowblown night. Eventually, they pulled into the outskirts of Coldwater.
“I wonder how far ahead they are?” Diane asked.
“Hard to say,” Hottel replied. “There’s no way they’re going to be able to go fast on the Rochester line.”
“There’s one way to find out,” she said, slowing the engine for a switch while Hottel went out onto the running board to check it. She reached for the microphone and called, “SX-3217, this is Extra 451.”
Five miles to the north, Cziller had put the section gang to digging at the hopeless mess that buried the two D&O engines. While this took a large bite out of the poker game, it hadn’t stopped it completely: there were more men on SX-3217 than there were shovels. Cziller was in the way car when the call from Extra 451 came in. The sweet feminine voice on the radio shocked him, but he had a chance to hide it. He turned to Anson and asked, “Is that what you meant about the Alco engineer being something else?”
The engineer nodded. “It doesn’t seem like you’d ever expect a cute little tyke like her to even set foot in a railroad yard, but she runs their Alco, and I’ve even seen her running their steamer.”
“I will be damned,” Cziller said, and reached for the way car’s radio to return her call, “Extra 451, this is SX-3217. Where you at?”
“We’re at Coldwater. Just cleared the switch for the Rochester branch.”
“We’re about five north,” Cziller replied. “We’re in trouble. We’re going to need a tug.”
Diane replied that she only had 660 horsepower in the little switcher. “I don’t know how much help that’s going to be,” she said.
Cziller looked at Anson, who shook his head. “I don’t know myself,” the road foreman said. We’re not getting either Geep to bite. Leave the plow there in Coldwater, since it doesn’t have a coupler in front, then ease your way up here.”
As Cziller hung up the microphone, Anson asked, “Steve, you don’t really think that little switcher is going to yank this rig out of the mess we’re in, do you?”
“Don’t know,” the road foreman responded. “It might be just what’s needed. She’ll have a clear pull from behind on bare tracks. I don’t know that the Geeps are on the ground, or what, but a good yank from behind might make the difference.”
A few miles north of Coldwater, Diane slowed the Alco to a crawl, then radioed ahead, “I don’t know exactly where you are, and I can’t see very far ahead. Could you have someone go out a few hundred yards and set out a couple of fusees so I’ll know when I’m coming up on you?
Already done,” Cziller replied. “I sent someone out right after you called the last time. Where are you now?
“About four north of Coldwater. I ought to be coming up to you shortly.”
Within another couple minutes, she could see the red glare of the burning flares in the blowing snow ahead. She slowed the engine, and a shivering Bruce Page got on board.
“Man, it’s colder than the ass end of a polar bear,” he said. “I never thought I’d be so happy to see this puddle-jumper.”
“What happened?” Hottel asked.
“Don’t know. Apparently the plow rode up, and enough snow got under the engines to pick up the wheels. I was in back, but Bartenslager was really jamming those old pigs along. Everybody wound up on their ass.”
Hottel leaned over and whispered, “Watch your language.”
Page looked around in the half-light and saw who the engineer of the little Alco was. “Oh, hi, Miss Lee. Sorry.”
“That’s all right,” she snapped, more aggrieved about the insult to her engine than she was about the language, which she could tolerate. “How far ahead is the train.”
“About three hundred yards, I guess,” Page replied. “I wasn’t exactly pacing off the distance.”
“Diane, I don’t want to insult you,” Cziller said, “But if you want one of our guys to run your engine, they’re available.”
“Thanks, Steve,” she told him. “But I guess I’d better do it, anyway. I’ve got a better idea of what it’ll do than one of your people.”
“If you can handle it, that’s good enough by me,” he said. The Alco was already coupled up to the second way car. “It’s just as well. That way, I can have someone on each engine, so maybe the second one can pull when it gets some bite.”
“How much longer?”
“Another couple minutes,” he told the redhead. “We’ve still got to get the M.U. lines off. Now, we’ll want to get a nice, easy pull. Shoot sand to it, and don’t let it slip.”
As Cziller had promised, in a couple minutes all was ready. “All right, everybody,” he ordered. “Back ’em all down easy.”
Outside the open door of the way car, the Alco’s unsupercharged engine barked. The angle was wrong to see, but inside the way car Cziller knew that the Alco had to be blasting black smoke out of its stack almost as thickly as if it were a steam engine. “Harder,” he called.
The way car lurched.
SX-3217 came loose. It was a series of bumps and sudden stops, progress picking up as more wheels reached solid track. Cziller wasn’t concerned about the elegance of the maneuver; the important thing was that the rescue train was out of the snowdrift.
“We’re clear,” Bartenslager reported from the 3217.
“Idle ’em down,” Cziller ordered. “Second shift stays on duty. First shift, back to the poker game. Section gang, ah, Jim, they’ve got to be up around you somewhere. I want them to stay here and inspect the track for any damage. If there is, have them try to have it fixed by the time we get back. Have them leave fusees for us to pick them up. Diane, good job.”
“Thanks, Steve,” came a feminine voice over the radio.
“I meant it,” he said. “I thought a little power in the right place might help. We’ll uncouple you. You go back to Coldwater and get back on the siding where you left the rotary. We’ll follow and back past you, so we can switch plows.”
“Give me plenty of lead,” she told him. “You can’t see very far in this stuff, and I don’t want you backing into me.”
“Get going, then. It’ll take a few minutes to get everything organized here.” He motioned Page to the coupler; the young brakeman went out the back door of the way car and pulled the uncoupling lever. “You’re off,” Cziller reported.
“See you later,” she replied. The little engine barked, and its headlight began to back off into the night. About that time, the section gang burst into the way car and started to gather up flares and tools.
“You understand,” the foreman told Cziller, “That we’re not going to be able to get a lot done in a half hour or so if there’s anything screwed up.”
“Right. This way, you’ve got that much head start, if there is. We’ll just have to sit here until it’s fixed, anyway.
“Jesus,” the foreman replied. “Just when I had a hot streak going.”
A few minutes later, Cziller radioed to Bartenslager in the 3217. “All right, let’s get going. Keep it slow. Bigelow and I will be back here spotting, but visibility isn’t going to be very good. Keep an ear on the engine; I want to know if we screwed anything up on it back there.”
As soon as SX-3217 was moving, Cziller radioed, “Extra 451, how you doing?”
“I’ve gone about four miles, I think,” came the immediate reply.
“Good enough. Let us know if you slow down or stop.”
“Full house,” Anson told the diminished group of poker players. “Jacks and threes.”
“Harry, you may be the luckiest engineer I’ve seen tonight,” DeTar mumbled. “But you sure as hell ain’t the prettiest. Now, that’s something I’d like to conduct.”
“Like to see you try it,” Anson replied, raking in the money on the table. “I’ll admit she’s got one of the nicest cabooses I’ve ever seen, but I think she’d brain you with a coal scoop.
A few minutes later, Diane’s voice came again over the radio. “SX-3217, Extra 451. I’ve got to throw the switch. Better take it real easy. This may take a few minutes.”
“Make it so,” Bigelow told the engineer over the radio. The train continued southward at a speed of no more than five miles per for what seemed like forever, until the girl’s breathless voice came over the radio once again.
“I’m clear of the branch,” she reported. “I’ve left the switch thrown for you.”
“Took her long enough,” Cziller snorted. “Her brakeman must have terminal arthritis.”
Hottel looked up from his poker game. “Unless she took someone from here, she hasn’t got a brakeman. She must have got out and thrown the switch herself.”
“She didn’t bring anybody from Lordston with her?”
“Just Dean and me,” the mechanic replied.
The road foreman shook his head. “You’d think she would have said something.”
“Not likely,” Hottel snorted. “She’s not about to ask for help with something she knows she can do herself.”
SX-3217 backed past the switch where the Alco was waiting. Anson stopped the lead Geep just short of the other engine, and the head-end brakeman uncoupled the LN’s plow. Then, they backed on past, and the brakeman threw the switch so that Diane and the 451 could back out onto the main line and pull forward to pick up their own plow.
While the LN engine was getting hooked up, SX-3217 crept forward and picked up the now repaired rotary, then backed onto the main once again. Once they were clear, Diane re-entered the siding, and SX-3217 was clear to pass.
While all this shuffling was going on, Cziller told Bigelow, “I’m going to have a talk with our redheaded friend. I’ll be back in a minute.” He raised his voice. “Bruce,” he called to the junior brakeman, “Bring your stuff and come with me.”
The two of them walked over to the orange Alco. “How’s this thing running?” he asked Diane.
“Just fine.”
“Spike tells me that you’re alone, that you didn’t bring anyone with you.”
“Spike?” Diane replied questioningly. “Oh, one of the mechanics,” she answered herself. “Well, there was no one to bring at that hour of the night. I’m used to doing my own switching. We never have long consists.”
Cziller smiled. “Our union people scream enough about two-man crews, but Diane, you just set a new target.” His attitude changed to one more serious. “Look, it’s no time for anyone to be out alone in this weather. If something should go wrong, it’s just not safe. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll send Bruce, here, back to Lordston with you. Once you get there, find him a hotel room or something. Bruce, when the storm’s over, grab a bus back to Putnam.”
“No thanks,” Diane replied harshly. “I don’t need any help.”
“Diane,” Cziller said gently, “It’s just not that safe out there in this weather.”
“We made it up here with no problems.”
“And you’ll make it back without any, probably. But I’d feel a whole lot better if something did go wrong if I don’t have to explain to your father why I let you go back alone.”
“Oh, all right,” she snapped. “It’s a total waste, but all right.”
“Good enough,” he said, and turned to the young brakeman. “Bruce, you take it easy. Diane, thanks to you and your dad and your engine here.”
“Good luck, Mr. Cziller,” the brakeman replied. “Hope you make it through all right.”
Once the switching was completed, the orange Alco drove hard up the track to the east, with a seething Diane Lee running it and Bruce Page along for the ride.
Page spent the ride silently looking out one side of the cab while the redhead’s resentment at Cziller’s overprotectiveness burned at her.
“Long night,” the brakeman said in a shy effort to break the silence. “When we get to Lordston, can I take you somewhere for breakfast?
“No thanks,” she said sharply. “I’ve been up all night. I’ve got to get to bed, and ALONE, thank you.”
There wasn’t much that Page could say to reply. The rest of the trip back to Lordston was in an icy silence.
Up in the 3217’s cab, Cziller picked up the radio microphone and called, “Who’s in the plow?”
“Me. Pickering.”
“How’s it running?”
“Running fine. We ran it on the way over here. We didn’t get into any deep snow with it, but I ran the speed up and it ran real smooth.”
“Good enough. Let’s hope it keeps running. Bigelow, is everybody buttoned up back there?”
“Sure enough,” the conductor reported. “Except for DeTar. He just dropped fifteen bucks on a pair of eights.”
“He’d better get that out of his system before we pick the section gang up,” Cziller replied. “Let’s get this show on the road. We’ve wasted enough time.”
Bartenslager brought the power up on the Geeps, and SX-3217 began to move. It took them only a few minutes to get to the burning fusees that marked where they had been stuck earlier. The train stopped, and Cziller swung down from the cab and walked through the blowing snow to where the section gang was struggling. “What’s the problem?” he asked.
“You derailed her,” one of the section men said. “Broken fishplate, and the rail ends came apart. You were just damn lucky that you were able to pull back up onto the tracks.”
“How much longer to fix it?” Cziller asked.
“Another couple minutes. Just got one more bolt to take up, if you’re in a hurry. We should drill some holes and put in a few spikes, but if we mark the spot and take it real easy, we could sort of sneak over it.”
“How long will that take?” the perturbed Cziller asked.
“Twenty minutes, maybe less.”
“Better do it,” the road foreman said. “We’ve messed around here long enough, but if we mark it, the marks might get blown away. If someone comes up here with a heavy train, they could be in a world of shit.” He turned back to the way car, hoping that someone had given up poker long enough to make a fresh pot of coffee.
It was closer to half an hour before Bartenslager gingerly eased the 3217 over the newly-repaired section of track. The track wasn’t very smooth here, and up in the cab, the engine rolled altogether too much for Cziller’s liking. “How does it feel to you?” Cziller asked the engineer.
“Half-assed job from the word go,” Bartenslager replied. “But it feels like they’ve got ballast problems, here, and they couldn’t do anything about that, anyway. Sure wouldn’t want to go over it at any speed.”
“We’ll warn Putnam to put a slow order on it,” Cziller replied. “They’ve really let this branch go to pot since I was up here last. This used to be a pretty good stretch.”
“You haven’t lived until you’ve come from Big Pit down to Rochester with maybe five thousand tons of aggregate,” the engineer replied. “That’ll give you the trots for a week.”
“You and Harry know this track better than I do,” Cziller said as the engine noise from the plow began to make itself heard in the cab. The plow bit into the snowdrift that SX-3217 had been stalled in just a little while before. “You guys just make sure you take it easy on stuff like that. I don’t want to lose any more time if I can help it.”
Shortly, the speed of the train stabilized. The plow was throwing snow downwind, and the northeasterly wind carried the flying powder past the left side of the cab. SX-3217 crawled northward steadily for the next hour. There were places where Bartenslager could speed up a little, and places where progress slowed even more. Eventually, an increased number of inhabited places told the trainmen that they were nearing Rochester.
The last mile into Rochester was a dilly. The tracks had been following along a fairly level plain, but here they dove through a deep cut, down a steepish grade, through another deep cut and around a sharp bend before they crossed a low trestle and got into Rochester proper.
The first cut was deep; it had filled to more than ten feet since the storm started. The plow burrowed through it, the snowblast from the rotary blasting the roof off of the tunnel that the blade was digging. “Man, I don’t believe that,” Cziller told Bartenslager. “I think I begin to see why they braced hell out of that dumb thing.”
The grade into town was somewhat easier, since the wind had blown most of the snowfall away, and only a foot or two covered the tracks. It was well that Bartenslager descended the grade slowly, however, for when they reached the lower cut, they found it packed even deeper than the first one. “What do you think, Dean?” Cziller asked over the radio.
“Might make it,” the mechanic replied. “But let’s go real slow.”
The train crept forward until the front of the plow was buried in the snowdrift, the blast of the plow knocking a fissure through the huge pile, leaving a narrow alley for the cupola of the plow to sneak through. The nose of the 3217 itself plowed away the remains of the rotary-dug tunnel. An immense time later, SX-3217 crept out onto the clear tracks of the trestle, and Bartenslager was able to pick up speed again.
“We’d better stop and have the section gang clear the snow off the running boards,” Bartenslager advised.
“OK, we’ll stop in town,” Cziller said, and made a call back to the way car to break up the poker game, then resumed his conversation. “I hope we don’t see much more like that.”
“The real work is just beginning,” the engineer replied. “There’s been nobody north of here all winter. We’ll probably see a lot more of them.”
Cziller had Bartenslager stop at the state road crossing, where a gas station sat next to the tracks, and radioed the way car, “Tom, I’ll call Putnam this time. I need to talk to them, anyway.”
“We’ve been wondering what happened to you,” the roadmaster replied to Cziller’s call. “I just had another call from Marks wondering where in hell you are.”
“We’re at Rochester,” the road foreman replied, and went on to explain about the problems with the plow and to warn about the bad trackage. “It’s a long story, but we’re moving good, now. If we can keep going, we should be able to get there about dark tonight. Are we cleared onto the Kremmling branch, yet?”
“Yeah,” the roadmaster said. “The only thing is, it’s their branch now, not ours. That was the other thing Marks called me about. I won’t go into the politics of the thing, but the C&SL just agreed to purchase the branch from us. They want you that bad, Steve.”
“Must be.”
“OK, your orders are to proceed on past Kremmling, but consider yourself under C&SL orders after that point. From Kremmling on, try to contact the C&SL on our yard frequency. Do not proceed past Warsaw on the C&SL main without contacting them. Steve, I’d be real careful the last couple miles going into Warsaw if they don’t know you’re there. You’d best buckle down, unless you want to get there after the fire is out.”
“It all depends on whether this stupid plow keeps running or not,” Cziller replied, somewhat heatedly. “Where you guys got the idea of coming up with that collection of junk is beyond me. Tell Desmond that sending us out with it was no favor.”
With Cziller back aboard, SX-3217 headed on to the northeast of Rochester. For the first few miles, the going wasn’t bad. Before the storm the snow on the tracks had accumulated to perhaps three feet on the average, but the storm had dumped another three or four feet on top of the three-foot base. The plow was working near its capacity in the older, thicker snow and the somewhat lighter new snow, hard-packed by the wind. The wind was now out of the northeast, and it blew the snow back toward the eastbound train. The left side of the train was soon packed with it.
They managed to crawl onward slowly, but steadily, for an hour. As they could see that the track would be passable, however difficult, some of the tension was starting to leave. Despite the difficult going, they were slowly approaching the next town up the line, Whiteport, and the plow was running smoothly.
They cut a trench through the little town, with Pickering madly manipulating the limited direction capacity of the rotary’s snowblast to avoid breaking windows in the houses alongside the track. Then, they pressed on, without stopping.
A couple miles to the east, the tracks started a broad, sweeping bend around the shore of Thurow Lake, and again they bent to the north. They were now back on the original main line north from Atlanta, that had been broken between Haleyville and Whiteport a few years earlier. The Kremmling branch, which had seemed so far out of reach as to be beyond imagination a few hours before, now seemed to be almost around the next bend.
The sound of the carrier wave on the radio, followed by Pickering’s voice, broke Cziller’s reverie. “Uh, Mr. Cziller, could we stop for a few minutes?”
Mr. Cziller. Pickering didn’t call him by his first name, Steve, so there must be problems again. His hopes fell as he said into the microphone, “What’s the problem, Dean?”
“This thing’s running hot,” the mechanic replied. “I kind of think that the radiator must be packed with some of the snow we blew out back there.”
That might not take long. “All right, we’ll stop and take a look at it. Way car, send Hottel up to help with it as soon as we get stopped.
It didn’t take long to stop at the speed they were going. Cziller tried to get out of the left side of the cab, and found it iced shut. He shrugged, and told Bartenslager to have someone from the section gang clean the engines off again, then went out the right-side door to work his way up to the plow.
He found Hottel and Pickering hard at work. “Not too bad,” Pickering replied to his query, “Like I thought, there’s snow packed in the air intake, and it’s kind of wet in there. I’m glad this is a diesel. An engine with an ignition would have been soaked dead.”
“How long this time?”
“Not long. Maybe ten minutes.”
“Good enough,” Cziller replied. “I’ll go back and refill my thermos.”
By the time the road foreman had made it back to the 3217’s cab with a fresh thermos of coffee, the plow was ready to go. Once Pickering was settled again in the plow’s cupola, Cziller radioed, “You find anything else?”
“Everything seems fine,” came the reply. “It seemed like the fan belt might be slipping a bit, so I tightened it. We cleaned out the snow, and let it go at that. I needed the break for a piss stop, anyway.”
“Good enough,” Cziller told him. “Let’s get moving.”
Once again, SX-3217 began to move. The plume of snowblast shattered the snow covering the trees off to the side of the tracks. Cziller poured himself a cup of coffee as the speed of the train stabilized again.
“STOP! WHOA! SHUT THIS THING DOWN!”
Coffee spilled in the engine cab and the way car as Bartenslager valved air in response to Pickering’s radioed cry. Cziller was on the radio almost immediately. “What’s the matter, Dean?”
There was no reply.
Cziller looked outside, to see the mechanic dancing around on the top of the plow. He charged out the door and yelled, “What in hell happened?”
“Sonuvabitching cooling system blew! The goddamn cab is full of steam!”
“You all right?”
“I hope so,” Pickering replied, settling down.
Hottel came charging up from the way car as Cziller said, “All right, let’s find out what in hell happened.”
An immediate inspection under the engine cover proved that there was a blown hose from the water pump to the radiator. “Easy enough to fix,” Hottel said.
“That ain’t all,” Pickering put in. “I called to stop before the hose blew. The water temperature was out of sight.”
With Cziller looking on, the two mechanics probed deeper.
The verdict was in shortly. “I hate to say this, but the water pump is shot,” Hottel said, shaking his head.
“You got a spare?” Cziller asked.
“Shit, no!” Pickering swore. “Nothing on this son of a bitch ever breaks that we’ve got a spare for!”
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it here,” Cziller said.
“We could fix the hose,” Hottel said. “We’ve got a spare for that. But I don’t know where we’re going to find a water pump.”
“There’s no point in sitting here while the track snows up behind us,” Cziller said. “Let’s at least get back to Whiteport. Maybe we can find a pump there, or something.”
“Doubt if you’re going to find much there,” Pickering said. “I go fishing there in the summer. There’s not much to the place.” The three of them walked back alongside the train to the way car. Within moments, the train was backing.
The poker game was still going on. The section gang had managed to win back a lot of the money they had lost to DeTar while the train was heading to Rochester. Now they were losing it again, mainly to Anson. While Anson gloated over his winnings, Cziller and the mechanics poured themselves coffee. It was getting pretty rank by now; it had sat on the way car stove all the way from Lordston.
While Cziller sipped the vile brew, his thoughts about the plow were just as bitter. It threw snow mightily when it was running, but when it stopped, it was a pain in the butt to get going again. What to do now? Water pumps for D-8 Caterpillar diesels are kind of scarce things, but might not be impossible to find in this logging country.
“Just had a thought,” Hottel said. “I know where we might get a water pump.” Cziller nodded, and Hottel went on, “You remember Ken Sawyer, the guy Miss Lee called over to help us weld on the plow? He told me he does a lot of work on Cats. Six will get you two that he’s got one.”
Cziller wasn’t very thrilled. Lordston wasn’t all that far away by snowed-up road, or even by the old, abandoned rail line. By good rail, it was a long way away. “That’s no good,” he told the mechanic. “There’s no way we can get that far, the way the tracks are drifting. We’d never make it through those cuts south of Rochester.”
They backed for a couple miles in near silence, broken only by the sound of the poker game. Finally, Hottel spoke again. “That water pump ain’t that heavy. Maybe we could get someone in Lordston to ride up the LN tracks, then on up the old grade on a snowmobile. Wish we’d put mine on board.”
“That would take at least a couple hours, maybe four or five,” Cziller replied. “But maybe you’ve got something there.”
There was a little restaurant in Whiteport that was open despite the blizzard, and it accomplished something that even a train wreck hadn’t been able to do: it brought the ceaseless poker game temporarily to a halt, as the entire crew headed for it, leaving the diesels sitting alone and unattended.
The sole waitress was going crazy trying to keep up with the orders brought on with the sudden descent of fifteen railroaders. While he waited, Cziller went to the phone on the back wall. A few minutes later, he joined Hottel at the table. “I think I got the dumbest telephone operator in the world, and God knows that’s pretty dumb,” he reported. “Sawyer has an unlisted number at home, and God knows what his business must be named. That dumbass bitch was no help at all. How the hell am I going to get in touch with him?”
“Why don’t you call Miss Lee?” Pickering suggested.
Cziller shrugged. “She’s probably asleep by now. I’d hate to wake her up.”
“Got any better ideas?” Hottel snorted.
“Now that you mention it, no.” Cziller got up and went to the phone.
Once the Alco was parked in the engine shed, Diane pointed Bruce Page to a motel up the street, then walked through the storm to her home not far away. She had been up all night, and she was tired. She barely had her clothes off and into bed before she was asleep.
She slept for perhaps an hour when the continual ringing of the phone brought her back to consciousness. The caller proved to be Cziller. “What can I do for you, now?” she asked sleepily.
“We’ve got more trouble, Diane,” he said apologetically. “We blew the water pump on the plow. Do you know Ken Sawyer’s phone number? Spike thinks he might be able to get us a water pump.”
“I’ve got it, sure,” she replied, a little more awake. “What good is that going to do you? Are you going to come back here and get it?”
“No,” Cziller replied. “Do you know where Page is?”
“I left him at the motel up the street?”
“Do you know anyone that would lend him a snowmobile for a few days? What I was thinking is that he could bring the water pump up your line and along the abandoned part. That way, I’d get him back.”
“I could probably find someone,” she said. “But I thought you said you didn’t want anybody out alone in this stuff. I agree with you, this time. He would be in a lot of trouble trying to find his way through this whiteout, and he doesn’t have a clue as to the route up here.”
“You’re right, Diane,” Cziller admitted. “It was a stupid idea. Do you know anybody down there wh really knows snowmobiles and would be able to try it?”
“I could find someone,” she said, “Or . . . where did you say you were at?”
“I’m calling from Whiteport,” Cziller told her. “We went pretty good there for a while.”
“Steve, if you think I can handle it, I can get the Alco going again and bring the pump up to you.”
“Diane, I don’t want to put down your ability, but that’s kind of a long haul. There’s two cuts just south of Rochester, and they are bad. I don’t think that your plow could get through them by now. They were really, really bad.”
She thought for a moment. “If you were to go back to Rochester and meet me there, we wouldn’t be that far apart if I couldn’t get through. We might have to walk a ways, or you might have to find a snowmobile. But I might be able to get through.”
Cziller was silent for a few moments, making up his mind. “Do you think you can be away for a few days?”
She wondered why, and he went on, “I’d like you and your Alco to go on with us to Warsaw. I’m pretty sure they need the power there, and we’ve got to go up that bad branch. Your Alco is lighter; with the rotary, it might be able to make it through, even if the Geeps can’t. Until we get to the branch, we can leave your engine and plow on the end, pointed south. If the rotary breaks again, we’d have your plow pointed so we could go get parts.”
“I can get away for that,” she said. “I was a little miserable at letting Dad have all the fun. I’m sorry I was so snappy earlier, Steve. Give me an hour to get the water pump, get your man, and get the Alco going. Then, say an hour to Coldwater, and another hour on to Rochester. I ought to be able to meet you in Rochester about one, if I can get through those drifts.”
“If you can’t, we’ll get the pump and dig you out.” Cziller was getting a little paternal, perhaps. “Make sure you bring enough warm stuff to last a few days. The gal in the restaurant here said the fire is still going, with no end in sight. We don’t have a radio for the news, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it lasts for days, yet.” He gave her the part number for the pump, and warned her to take it easy on the Rochester branch where they’d been stuck, earlier.
On his way back to the table, Cziller noticed that the poker game had only taken a temporary break. It was now going on at a table in the center of the place. The waitress had about finished taking orders, and Cziller added an order for a large breakfast, then went back to join Hottel, Pickering, and Bartenslager. “You got something worked out?” the engineer asked.
“Yeah,” the road foreman said. “She’s going to get the pump and take it to Rochester. We’re going back there to meet her. Spike, you know how on a car with a busted water pump, you can fill it with water and run it for a few minutes?” The mechanic nodded, and Cziller went on, “Can we do that with the plow long enough to dig out a hole on a siding for one of the engines?”
“Sure, no problem,” Hottel said. “It’s just when I tell you to cut it out, I’ll meant to cut it out now!”
“All right,” Cziller said. “The 3259 had her apron southbound. Let’s bust her out of line and let her lead back. If we get right on it, the tracks shouldn’t snow up too bad for the apron.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Bartenslager said. “The tracks had drifted over some just coming back here.”
“Well, we’d better eat quick and get on it,” Cziller said, raising his voice so the whole crew could hear. “We’re going to leave here in an hour, food or no food. We’re going to go back to Rochester, and the Lordston Northern is going to bring the pump to us.”
There was a flurry of activity in the kitchen as DeTar’s voice broke the silence: “I’ll raise you a dollar, you son of a bitch.”
It took Diane Lee some real effort to get going, since she had been dragged from a deep sleep, though she would be a busy young woman after she did wake up. Before she got out of bed she called Sawyer, who proved to have a pump that would work on the snowplow’s engine. He promised to get it over to the railroad office. Following that she called the motel and got Bruce Page on the phone. “Your man Cziller wants us to make another run, this time to Rochester,” she said. “There’s a restaurant a couple doors up the street from that motel you’re in. Get us both some breakfast to go, and I’ll meet you at our office as soon as I can get there.”
In a few minutes she was dressed. She walked through the snowstorm carrying a sleeping bag with a few spare clothes in it and arrived at the engine shed just as Page arrived from the other direction. “Do you want to eat first, or get the engine going?” he asked.
“I suppose we ought to warm up the engine,” she said. “We’ll have to get the doors open first, and hook up the APU. Once we’ve got it going, we can eat while it’s warming up, then back out and top off the fuel. By then, Sawyer ought to be here with the pump and we can go.”
The Alco was a hard starter, as she had warned Cziller the night before. Even though it hadn’t been shut off very long, it proved a little touchy to get going. Diane was more used to the engine than Jim Bartenslager had been, and she had it purring in a few minutes. She backed it out of the engine shed, and Page closed the door. Right about then, Sawyer showed up with the pump, and the breakfasts lay cooling and forgotten until after she had moved the engine to the fuel hose. They were out on the North Central main, heading for Coldwater, before either of them remembered the food. “Too bad this isn’t an EMD E-unit,” Page commented.
“Why?” she asked stiffly, expecting another insult to the rust-colored Alco.
“There was a guy on the Rock Island, down in Illinois, who said that you could cook on the oil cooler cover of an E-8,” Page replied. “My dad told me about him once. Said it did a real good job. Now, that makes me think about the guy I used to know who cooked cans of beef stew by wiring them to the exhaust manifold of his car.”
“Well,” she replied, less on the defensive. “That’s one thing Dad and I didn’t put in this thing when we rebuilt it.”
“You and your dad rebuilt this?” he asked, regarding clinically a piece of cold, greasy fried egg.
“Mostly, just the two of us. We had some help from Ken Sawyer, and there were a couple of people from Putnam who came up once in a while when we ran into something that we really needed help with. Dad and I did most of it here, though. I did a lot of the dirty work myself, and Dad even let me paint it the color I wanted to.”
“It fits you,” he said, regarding her hair with an artist’s eye, while he threw the remains of the breakfast back into the paper sack. “I can’t take any more of this stuff,” he added.
“Here, take mine,” she agreed. “I can’t, either.” Page set the sack of garbage on the floor, next to the mostly forgotten water pump that SX-3217 needed so badly.
After that, the conversation that had started so well flickered and died out, for running the Alco somehow reminded Diane of the insult she had perceived the night before. Even though Page tried to be friendly, she snapped at him, and he mentally said, the hell with it. He was used to not having much luck with women and settled down to spend most of the trip staring out of the window into the storm.
On the other side of the cab, Diane peered out into the snowstorm as well, but she was trying to judge what might lie ahead. The visibility was poor, and she couldn’t see very far ahead of the plow. In the back of her mind, she realized she was pushing harder than she should, but she had been down this track a few hours before, and everything had been all right, then.
She didn’t know the track very well though. This morning had been the first time she had ever run an engine over the track, although she’d been over it in the past riding in other cars. It wasn’t LN track, or even D&O track, and she supposed that there would have to be some paperwork done sometime to show that the trip had been done under lease from the D&O, or something.
She made a note in her head that she’d have to take it easier once they got past Coldwater. They’d be heading into the snowstorm, instead of more or less downwind, and the visibility would be even worse. Other than earlier today, she had never taken an engine over that stretch either, although she’d been over it in cabooses or high railers. There would be plenty of time to take it easy and still make it to Rochester before one o’clock.
Miles to the north, SX-3217 was also trying to make it to Rochester by one. They weren’t moving as fast as Cziller would have liked, for the tracks had already drifted up since their earlier passage, and Bartenslager in the 3259 was finding it hard going.
The road foreman was riding in the 3259, of course. He was a little perturbed at himself for allowing everyone to screw around for so long in the understaffed little restaurant, but he had realized that shooing everyone out would have only saved a few minutes as well as done nothing but gotten the whole crew pissed off at him. But if the going didn’t get any harder, there wouldn’t be any problem.
“Would you look at all that snow,” Bartenslager said, making conversation. “How long has this storm been going on, anyway?”
“Only started early yesterday morning, believe it or not,” Cziller replied. “We started getting some flakes before that, but it didn’t get serious until around nightfall. There’s been a hell of a lot of snow, since.”
“You’d think that they’d have the fire out by now, or that it would have burned out the town.”
“You were too busy playing poker back there. Once the waitress brought the food, she told us that she’d been listening to the news. They’ve lost a couple of their big plants. The only reason they’ve been able to keep it down to that is that the Camden and Spearfish Lake has been hauling in fire departments using their flatcars, bringing t hem from towns all up and down the line. Marks told me last night they were having engine problems, but they must have managed to keep something going. That’s why we’re going up there, to try and help them out.”
“Dirty and Old to the rescue,” Bartenslager smirked, then got serious. “Would you look at the size of that drift?” The thick snowdrift staggered the 3259, but didn’t stop it. “Hope we don’t have to see many more of those,” the engineer remarked as the speed built up again.
“Probably see a lot more,” Cziller said. “We’re only halfway back to Rochester now.”
“How long do you figure we’ll have to wait?”
“Hard to say. Diane . . . Miss Lee said she thought she’d be able to make Rochester about one. We ought to be there about the same time. Hottel says that once we have the pump, it won’t take long to change it.”
“Well,” Bartenslager cocked his head. “I guess that means I’ve got time to get back in the game for a little while.”
It was nearly noon when the rust-colored Alco reached Coldwater. Diane slowed the engine to a crawl, and on the other side of the cab, Page started looking outside to get some idea of where they were. He’d been up this way more than she had, but everything looked strange with all the snow on it.
The track had been fairly clear from Lordston, despite all the snow that had fallen since their passage earlier, but here in town, where the wind was masked by buildings and the like, it had had a chance to settle and drift. They had to plow through two or three feet of newly drifted snow in places.
Coldwater was plugged tight, like every other town for a hundred miles in any direction. The city’s plows had been fighting a losing battle with the streets. Even now, the snow was so deep that only four-wheel drive vehicles could negotiate the main streets; on side streets and everywhere else, only snowmobiles could pass.
People in Coldwater were mostly staying home. Where there were things to be done, they were done with great difficulty. Even for a northern town, used to a lot of snow and equipped to handle it, this storm was bad enough to bring the town almost to a halt. The passage of the little Alco, blowing for every crossing, did surprise those who noticed it.
Not many people seemed to notice though. There were several crossings in the town, and Bruce spotted most of them from memory, with Diane blowing the whistle to clear the snowmobiles out of the way. Finally, they got to the switch for the Rochester branch. In spite of having been there the night before, they were past it before they noticed it. Diane backed the engine down to before it again, and then Page got out and dug at the switch. Once he got it thrown, she shoved her way past it and waited while the brakeman put it back the other way.
“How many more crossings do we have to deal with right away?” Diane asked.
“Two, I think,” he said. “Then, there’s another about a mile out. There’s not much of anything after that until we get up near Rochester. There’s some forest trails that cross the tracks, but unless we see the signs, I’ll never notice where they are.”
Conversation in the cab fell off after that as the two of them got serious about looking out into the snowstorm. The wind was now coming out of the northeast, and they were headed into it, with it blowing across the tracks from right to left. As expected, visibility was nearly nothing, and Diane kept the speed of the Alco low for a while, until she felt more comfortable with the altered situation. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she had been able to see more the night before.
Once out of Coldwater, she sped up a little, since the going wasn’t as bad as it seemed. She was getting a headache from staring into the storm, and she was a little irritated when Page spoke twenty minutes or so later, “It must have been around here somewhere that we got stuck last night. Better take it easy.”
“I think it’s farther on,” she replied with an edge in her voice. Page’s knuckles turned white as he held on to the grab bar, to keep from replying in the same tone. Why did she have to be so sensitive about everything?
Bruce’s instincts proved him right. All of a sudden, the Alco’s nose rose slightly, then fell off and down to the left at a sickening angle.
Bruce, already with a good grip, held on. Diane hadn’t been hanging on, and as the engine tilted off the tracks, it pitched her up out of her seat and laid her out across the cab floor at Bruce’s feet, landing hard.
The Alco scuttled to a stop, its nose deep in a snowbank. “You all right?” the brakeman asked.
A moan from the crumpled girl was the only response.
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