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

Chapter 20

1747 1/9/1981 – 2017 1/9/1981:
C&SL Snowplow Extra Two
Lordston Northern Extra 9608

Ralph McPhee was back at the controls of the old Baldwin as the combined Plow Extra Two/Extra 9608 headed north from Blair. The old 2-6-0’s owner was firing. “Begins to look like we might make it,” the old man commented.

“I wonder what’s going on up there.” Lee said.

“One of the boys back in the way car has a portable radio,” McPhee told him. “It seems the paper plant is all burnt out, and they’re fighting a fire in the town itself. We ought to be able to make Spearfish Lake before too much longer. From what I gathered, they still need us.”

“Hope we get there,” Lee replied. “That D&O switcher could go at any time, and this engine could, too.”

“I know,” the old man said. “Like me, she’s too old to trust out by herself.”

“I think we’re getting close enough that Ellsberg could come and get us if something went wrong.”

“He maybe could, if he’s still got an engine running up there, or if he’s not too busy doing something else. Let’s just hope everything stays together.”

“I damn sure hope so,” Lee said. “This old girl has been holding together well enough on summer excursion service, but after the beating we’re giving her, I wouldn’t want to trust her as far as I could throw a fit.”

There were three rescue trains working on the relief of Warsaw, and by now, each of them had established a separate personality, different from the others.

Plow Extra One, for example, had been a continual game of cannibals and missionaries: needs to be met at both ends of the run at the same time, but they only had enough power, time, and people to be at one end at a time. For a day and a half they had rushed back and forth, hardly at one end of the run before they desperately needed to head back the other way.

SX-3217, the Decatur and Overland train on the eastern route, commanded by Steve Cziller and supported by the Lordston Northern Alco, had been made up of furious dashes forward, fast but short, broken by long, depressing halts. Still, despite the longer distance to cover, they had been closer to Warsaw than Plow Extra Two was now.

Plow Extra Two had the simplest personality of them all: it had been a straight-ahead slugging match virtually every inch of the way, a lightweight having to land heavy blow after heavy blow, with too little power to work with. The rushes forward that the tripleheader made gained them not miles, but yards, and sometimes feet; then, they would back off and charge the snow again. It was hard on the men; it was nearly impossible for the equipment.

Fragile though the old Baldwin might be, it had been a mainstay of the operation. Plow Extra Two would not have gotten five miles north of Moffat without the old engine. The Camden and Spearfish Lake forty-four-ton switcher was a little thing, indeed; thankful though everyone was to have her, the contributions of power that it made were relatively slight. Up in front, the D&O SW9 was really the key to the whole operation. It was the largest engine the train had, in both weight and power, and now, as they battered their way north from Blair, it became clear even to Ralph McPhee in the Baldwin that the 1478 was no longer well.

It had become necessary to back off and charge at snowdrifts that the train would have crashed through without stopping a few hours before. McPhee and Ballard had agreed that they would push the 1478 until it dropped. They weren’t that far from Spearfish Lake: less than twenty miles. That would be twenty miles of hard going, but once they reached Spearfish Lake, it might be possible for Ed Sloat to fix the switcher, if the C&SL had the spare parts.

After the Meeker to Blair run, the run north from Blair to Albany River was relatively easy, in spite of the intermittent power from the lead engine. McPhee had predicted a couple of bad cuts on this stretch, and Ballard was beginning to wonder where they might appear.

The first of the two wasn’t as bad as McPhee had expected. They were able to drop the consist and batter their way through in several runs, the 1478 sounding sicker with each run. Finally, the snow eased, and they inched their way forward to the second one, not far away.

The second cut was another crosswind, narrow cut, much like the one they had been stalled in south of Meeker. This time, the track leading up to the cut had been covered in three feet or more of snow, and with the 1478 not adding much to the progress of the train, the speed they had was not the mad rush that had almost buried the three engines that morning. Now, as the snow got radically deeper, Plow Extra Two just sighed gently to a stop. “Let’s back off and try again,” Ballard called over the radio.

With the consist parked a quarter of a mile behind, the three engines backed off perhaps two hundred yards and charged with all the power they had left. Even with one of them sick, in that distance the three could work up a healthy rate of speed. The 1478 burped, the 303 roared, and the 9608 chuffed an immense cloud of black coal smoke, yet the headlong charge gained them only about thirty yards in the deepening snow.

“Poke her again,” McPhee ordered. The three engines backed off for yet another run, as they had done maybe a couple of hundred times before in the last day.

While they were backing, Ballard called over the radio, “Ralph, that stuff is getting deep. We almost buried the plow in it that time.”

“Don’t know what else we can do but try again.”

Again, the engines belched and burped and snorted as they charged the drift. This time, they gained less; maybe twenty yards, with at least a couple hundred more to go.”

“Back her down,” McPhee ordered again.

This time the order was greeted as it had been several times before on this trip: by the panting of the 9608 as she spun her drivers, to the tune of blaring wheel slip alarms from the diesels. Each engineer idled his engine, and Ballard called on the radio, “They’re going to love us back there. I just wish we’d brought the frontloader.”

“Yep, it’s shovel time again,” McPhee agreed. “I reckon no problem getting loose back here. I’ll go back and get ’em.”

After the storm was over, the passengers on Plow Extra Two would swear up and down that they had dug the train out for the entire distance. In fact, this was the first time that the snow shovels had been out of the boxcar in ten hours and something like twenty-five miles.

The digging may have been worse this time, since everybody had been traveling, however slowly, for most of a day, and they were getting rather tired of it. Still, Milt Johnson was able to rouse his conglomeration of snow shovelers without too much trouble.

“Let’s try something,” McPhee told the fireman. “It shouldn’t be too much trouble to dig out the plow and the engine, but we’re still going to have a hell of a time getting through here. Once you get the engines loose, send your people down the track and have them dig down in that drift a bit. Maybe if we can dig it down to the height of the plow, we can push through it without burying the plow again.”

The 1478 and the plow didn’t take long to dig out, as McPhee had predicted, but digging a trench perhaps ten feet wide, four feet deep and a couple of hundred yards long took some time. Lee busied himself for a while servicing the old steamer, for she required care and feeding whenever she was stopped. McPhee and Stevens pitched in, more to help kill the time than to do anything else. By now the old engine was carrying a heavy coating of ice and crusty snow; all the engines were, but somehow it seemed more cruel to the old showpiece.

Ballard and the on-duty D&O men retreated to the way car, where the coffee pot was simmering. Ballard brought the steamer crew a cup of coffee.

“You know,” McPhee said, “It’s too bad that steam was going out just when instant coffee was coming in.”

“Why’s that?” Ballard asked.

“Well, on a steam engine, you had all the hot water you needed. I knew a lot of people who used to perk coffee on steam engines, but it always seemed like too much trouble to me.”

“Never thought of that,” Ballard admitted. “But I always said that steam engines were coffee percolators at best.”

A day before, the steam people would have bristled at that remark; now, they recognized the good nature that had developed behind it. “Kind of dull, just sitting around here,” McPhee said. “What do you say we poke at that trench real gently, and see how they’re coming with it?”

“Beats standing around,” Ballard agreed. He went back to the way car to gather up his crew, who trudged forward to their engines.

“Hey!” Ballard’s voice came over the radio a minute later. “The 1478 isn’t running!”

“Guess we sit here a while more,” McPhee said. “We’ll be up in a minute.”

Lee and the two old men went forward to survey the situation. Lee was by far the most experienced diesel mechanic of the group – though his experience ran more to the LN Alco – and since no damage could be done now, he pulled the suspected injector down a bit.

It wasn’t long before he had an answer: “It’s shot internally. I can spin the drive shaft with my fingers and not get any resistance, so something must be sheared in there.”

“Ralph, would you have any idea if what’s-his-name up there in Spearfish Lake would have a 567-series injector pump in stock?” Ballard asked.

“No idea,” McPhee replied. “’Twouldn’t surprise me, since he’s got 567 engines. But ’twouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t, since I get the idea he runs on D&O spares a lot. You wouldn’t expect him to keep something in stock unless it busted a lot.”

“Well, nothing to do here, anyway,” Ballard said thoughtfully. “I suppose we could hit the coffee again while they’re digging at that thing. Once they get it dug down some more, we can putter away at it with the power we’ve got left.”

Several cups of coffee had been downed before McPhee ordered the plow train forward. They held the speed way down as they poked at the area where the passengers had been digging. They only gained a few yards with each run, what with the drag that the dead and drained 1478 put on them, but several runs put them past where the passengers had been digging and out to where the snow depth slackened off.

They went back and picked up the passenger consist again and brought it up to where the snow-encrusted passengers waited, then they plowed on north.

It was another five miles to Albany River, and without the help of the 1478, they were slow miles indeed. Really underpowered now, the people running Plow Extra Two had no thought of plowing with the consist attached; they had to clear the track a ways ahead with the plow, go back to pull the cars ahead a mile or so, then start all over again.

The weight of the now-dead 1478 seemed to McPhee to be more of a hindrance than a help. “The next siding’s at Albany River,” McPhee radioed to Ballard, who was riding the 1478 as a spotter. “Let’s leave that thing on it and go on without.”

“Sounds good to me,” the D&O man replied. “But only if they can’t fix it at Spearfish Lake.”

“Fix what at Spearfish Lake?” a strange feminine voice replied. “Is that you, Ralph?”

“It sure is,” the old man replied. He hadn’t thought they were in radio range of Spearfish Lake, but they must have been since that last cut. “You’re Betty, right?”

“No,” the woman said. “This is Kate Ellsberg. Where are you?”

“We’re about four miles out of Albany River. The D&O switcher died back there a mile or so. Is Bud there?”

“No, he’s up in Warsaw with the Milwaukee and the scram train. They’ve been gone three or four hours, now, and as far as we know, they’re still in Warsaw. They were planning on staying for a while.”

“Never mind,” McPhee replied, his hopes for help from Plow Extra One washed away. “Is Ed Sloat there?”

“He’s out in the shop.”

“Can you ask him if he has a 567-series injector pump in stock?”

“I don’t even need to ask him,” she said. “He was just up here complaining that he’d need one to get the Burlington going again.”

“They had it going again?”

“Yeah, this morning,” Kate told him. “But then it died on the way back from Warsaw with an ambulance run. Bud is mad enough to scrap it. What’s happening with you?”

“We’re still going,” McPhee said. “We’re going to leave the 1478 at Albany River. It’s been real slow going, and the passengers have had to get out and dig. What’s happening in Warsaw?”

“The paper plant has burned out, and they’ve got the fertilizer plant and some houses on fire. You’re not going to be too late. They still need you.”

“We was beginning to wonder,” McPhee admitted.

“How long before you’ll be here?” Kate wanted to know.

“Don’t want to say for sure. Depends on how well we can plow with just the 9608 and the 303. Won’t be real soon.”

McPhee hung up the microphone. Now, that was something. It seemed as if they had been battling their way forward endlessly, never getting anywhere, not knowing what was going on, and not even knowing if they were really needed. Now, even though it would be hours yet before they could reach the tracks that Plow Extra One had been clearing, they were in touch at last. It was a shame that the Spearfish Lake engines and plow were out of reach, for McPhee would have at least suggested that they meet him at Albany River. But they’d made do this far; they’d make do the rest of the way.

Eventually, they reached Albany River. It had been a long time since McPhee or any of the others had run a train this far north, and no one was sure where the switches to the sidings were in the snow. McPhee was pretty sure there was one at the south end of town, and one nearly downtown, but there was no sign of the first one. The switch stand had to be buried in the snow.

“Well, maybe we can find the other one,” McPhee told Lee. “It’s down at Albany River Coal and Lumber.”

Plow Extra Two punched onward through the little snow, in places throwing five feet of snow to the side. They crossed Main Street and worked on past the lumber yard, and still there was no sign of a switch.

“There ain’t no switch stands around here.” Ballard called over the radio.

“Got to be one,” McPhee replied. “Else that box car wouldn’t be sitting over there. Let’s back up to Main Street, get some shovelers out, and look for it. We need some more coal in the tender, and maybe we can find a hydrant and fill the water tank while we’re at it.”

A few minutes later, six firemen were throwing coal from the gondola into the tender, and a fire hose from one of the snorkel trucks was carrying water to the tender’s tank. McPhee had several men out in front with snow shovels. He glanced at where the train sat blocking Main Street, then took a snow shovel and laid it on a rail. Walking down the track, he pushed it down the rail a good hundred feet before he found switch points facing to the south. Pointing between the tracks, he told the firemen, “Dig down through here.”

The crew soon uncovered the switch mechanism, pointing like an arrow to where the switch stand lay buried in eight feet of snow. “It’s back there, somewhere,” McPhee told them. “Probably not too far. It’ll have a red and green metal flag on it. It’s got to be dug out before we can get out of here.”

It was fifteen minutes before the switch was revealed in the flashlights the men were carrying, and McPhee called a halt to the coaling of the tender. “That’ll do it for now,” he told the shovelers. “We can top it off again at Spearfish Lake.”

They plowed a place for the 1478 to sit, then backed out onto the main line, cut off the plow, and pushed the D&O switcher into its parking place, to leave it until who knew when. In a few minutes, a now-shorter Plow Extra Two was on its way again, with Stevens and Lee now running the steamer, and McPhee running the 304 with Ballard, since he wanted to see how the little diesel was running, and the 9608’s radio batteries were getting low.

The snow north of Albany River was worse than it had been on the other side, but without the 1478 they did better with it. The tracks bent to the northeast outside of town, and they now headed directly into the storm.

“California Cut’s ahead here another couple of miles,” McPhee told the younger man as they crawled into the storm. “If we can get through that, we’ve got Spearfish Lake made.”

“Know the place,” Ballard agreed. “That’s going to be a bastard. Let’s keep the shovelers close at hand.”

“If they have to shovel, I’m going to take a nap,” McPhee promised. I haven’t gone like this for this long in twenty years.”

“You should have taken a longer break back there.”

“Oh, I’ve taken it easy,” McPhee yawned again. “Ellsberg was right. If he hadn’t told us not to, Harold and I would have pitched coal until it killed us. Back there in Albany River was the first time I’ve touched a shovel since we left. I’m damn glad Bill Lee made it through, though. He’s younger and can take that kind of stuff, and Harold had a good rest back there. Me, I’m about all in, but I couldn’t sleep now without worrying about you kids.”

A few minutes later, California Cut loomed on them out of the darkness, but it carried a pleasant surprise: it was passable.

The cut lay northeast and southwest, and for most of the day the wind had been blowing straight through it, funneled by trees on the upwind side. The resulting blast of air had blown snow on through and out of the cut, down to where only the heavily-packed snow from earlier remained. The snow was heavy and hard to break up with the train’s low power, but there was no danger of burying the plow or getting stuck.

Low speed was all that the tiny relief train had to work with, but it was enough. It took them several runs to break up the windpacked snow: rough, lurching runs that were as hard as anything all day, but the issue was never in doubt.

“We ought to be able to handle it from here,” Ballard offered. “You want to go back to the way car and conk out?”

“Naw, I’m good for another few miles, and it ain’t that far to Spearfish Lake,” McPhee protested. “I can last that long. I’d better call in and get clearance to go into the office.”

A few minutes later, McPhee had Betty on the radio. “As far as we know, they’re still sitting in Warsaw,” she told the old engineer. “We never know for sure until they give us a call west of Hoselton, but the plan was for them to sit there. Unless we give you a call, bring it on in.”

Twenty minutes later, the first help to reach Spearfish Lake from the outside world since the fire and storm began came down the west wye of the Spearfish Lake yard. Betty, Kate, and Ed were waiting on the office platform to greet the little GE industrial switcher and the old Baldwin steamer that had finally fought their way through, guided by a handful of determined men, bringing a small but priceless load.

The greeters were not alone long, for more people soon arrived to meet the little train, while the GE idled softly at the fuel hose and the old 2-6-0 sat alone with the train, hissing softly with a job well done.

The first arrival was a city plow, followed by a truck from Statewide Welding. The welding supply house had been reduced to scrounging even nearly empty bottles of oxygen from their customers, for even the supply of welding oxygen was not holding out well, as much as was being used at the Spearfish Lake hospital. There were nearly twenty men using oxygen from the rapidly diminishing supply of green bottles, and several probably wouldn’t be able to do without. Now, the arrival of Plow Extra Two had given them life.

A line of Camden firemen wrestled bottle after bottle of medical oxygen out of the boxcar into the waiting truck, while a four-wheel drive van arrived to take the doctors and nurses that had come with the train directly to the hospital, where the reduced staff had been going continually for days coping with the flood of injuries that arrived every few hours with Plow Extra One’s ambulance runs.

All the effort that had gone into Plow Extra Two had been worthwhile, just with that part of its load.

The arrival of the train brought a fresh charge of energy to the exhausted Ralph McPhee. He had planned to go straight to the way car and sleep for a week, but the success of the trip felt so good that he wound up in the C&SL office with Harold Stevens, Bill Lee, and Gene Ballard, telling Betty, Kate, and Ed about the struggles they’d had, and waited for a load of food from Rick’s.

The Statewide Welding truck left at about the time the food arrived, and the trainmen were just digging into dinner when Milt Johnson came in. “I’ve got some guys topping off the tender,” he said, “And we’ve run a hose out to the hydrant. I figured you’d want to get her full for the trip to Warsaw.”

“Don’t know that we’re going to Warsaw,” McPhee said. “We only had clearance to Spearfish Lake, and we shouldn’t head on up there unless we know we’re going to have a clear track.”

“It’s probably safe,” Ed said. “Bud has been sort of expecting you all day, so he usually calls in when he’s downbound, if nothing else to let the hospital know to have an ambulance waiting.”

“I don’t like it,” McPhee said. “‘Probably’ and ‘usually’ ain’t good enough, and we can’t get him on the radio to find out for sure.”

“The telephone is still working,” Betty put in. “We can call the fire hall in Warsaw and see if he’s still there. If he is, we can pass the word for him to stay there.”

“Good idea,” Ballard agreed. “A lot of that stuff should get on up there, and I get the impression he can use us up there, too,”

“He sure can,” the mechanic said. “The Milwaukee has been protecting the scram train, but there’s no way that Walt could move it in one cut if they have to get out of town in a hurry. Bud will be glad to have the extra power up there, just to know that he can move that train if he has to.”

By now, Betty had called the fire hall in Warsaw. “What’s up?” McPhee asked her.

“They’re on the radio,” she replied. “The fire hall is on the other side of town from the tracks.”

A tired Fred Rumsey was taking his turn at manning the radio in the fire hall. It was a way to take a break; he had even been able to call Spearfish Lake and talk to Marie for a few minutes, to find out that Stormy was doing fine. A break was needed, too; he’d been so busy that he needed the rest.

Rumsey turned from the phone to the radio and asked, “Are there any units over near the train siding?”

A moment later a voice replied, “This is Kremmling Tanker 2. We’re gassing up next to the train.”

“Is the Spearfish Lake train still there?” the Warsaw man called.

The Kremmling man had come in over the road from the east, and wasn’t thoroughly clued in on the trains the way the people that had come from Spearfish Lake had been. He looked at the engine on the train, and could see lettered on the side, “Camden and Spearfish Lake”.

“It’s still here, Warsaw Base,” he replied. In fact, it was so much there that he thought he’d pick up a cup of coffee.

“Good enough,” the man at the fire hall replied. “Message for the train crew from Spearfish Lake. Tell them to stay there.”

“Um, I’m not real clear on that,” the Kremmling man said.

“Tell them to sit tight. Don’t leave town.”

“Clear on that, Warsaw Base.”

Rumsey said into the phone, “They’re going to be sitting down by the rest train.”

“They’re sitting in Warsaw,” Betty replied. “You should be able to get them on the radio yourselves when you get up onto the Hoselton flats. There’s a siding at Hoselton that could be used if there’s an ambulance run to go out.”

“How much water have you got in the tender, Milt?” McPhee asked.

“Nearly full,” the fire marshal said. “It’s pretty full of coal, too.”

“That ought to do,” McPhee said. “Get everybody loaded. The going ought to be pretty easy, since they’ve been keeping that track plowed, but we ought to get right up there before he has to come this way with an ambulance run.”

In a few minutes, the deep, rich howling of the old Baldwin’s steam whistle echoed off the buildings of Spearfish Lake. The passengers of Plow Extra Two had gotten used to being called back to the train by that whistle, and they hadn’t gotten very far away.

McPhee and Ballard headed for the cab of the 303. “I thought you were going to rest, Ralph” Ballard said.

“Oh, getting through perked me up pretty good,” the old man said. “Got to see this through to the end, now.”

“Suit yourself,” Ballard replied. “I don’t really think we’re going to need you up here, if you want to sleep.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Gene,” McPhee said as he looked around. “Looks like we’ve got everybody. Let’s go.”

The little center-cab switcher and the old steamer backed the now-somewhat-lighter consist out the west wye and onto the main. With the switches thrown, McPhee whistled the train forward and they began to pick up speed.

Even with the lessened power, they were able to see speeds that they hadn’t made since they hit the snowdrift south of Meeker, for Plow Extra One’s repeated passages with the big plow had cleared a trough through the deeply crusted snow. At most, the little plow had to deal with isolated big drifts, not sheets hundreds of yards long.

“By God, would you look at that,” Ballard said. “Twenty miles an hour. I’d forgotten this thing could go that fast.”

Walt’s headache was so bad that he couldn’t sleep, no matter how much he wanted to, so he was drinking coffee in the dining bus at Warsaw. Probably about his thirtieth cup that day; too. Only the caffeine was keeping him going, he suspected, even if he also suspected that all he’d had probably wasn’t making him feel any better, either. Waiting with the scram train was dull, but necessary, and the dining bus was a more congenial place to stay awake than the cab of the Milwaukee. He looked up when a voice called, “Hey, ain’t you the engineer of that engine?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

“I got a message for you from Spearfish Lake,” the Kremmling fireman said. “They want you to stay here and sit tight.”

“That’s a dumb message,” Walt said. “I’ve been sitting tight here forever.”

The fireman shrugged. “All I know is that Warsaw Base called over and asked if the train was still here. We’re sitting right here, so I told them it was, and they told me to tell you to sit tight.”

Walt let that turn over in his mind for a moment.

Then it hit him.

He stood up and raced for the door, yelling at the Kremmling fireman, “Get me to your radio! They meant the other train! I’ve got to get a message to Spearfish Lake!”

Within seconds, Walt was calling Warsaw Base. “Get a message to the Camden and Spearfish Lake office in Spearfish Lake, emergency! Plow Extra One left here almost two hours ago!”

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