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

Chapter 23

2356 1/9/1981 – 0606 1/10/1981:
C&SL Snowplow Extras One and Two
Lordston Northern Extra 9608

0357 1/10/1981 – 0606 1/10/1981:
D&O Snowplow Extra 3217

While Ed was out in the shop, tearing into a couple of injector pumps, Bud left the office and headed over to Rick’s. He’d had enough exposure to the National Guard’s stew in Warsaw – once was enough – to want to have a good meal, and he had steak on his mind. Rick’s was empty enough to give the little man time to cook it right.

It was the first time in a couple of days that Bud had been off railroad property, but even now, he didn’t get very far away. He took a portable radio with him and set it on the counter while the odor of steak began to build in the little restaurant.

Rick was working in the back of the restaurant, so Bud got his own second cup of coffee. While walking back to the radio, the little radio began to squawk. “Spearfish Lake, Spearfish Lake,” came Ballard’s voice. “This is Plow Extra Two. We’ve got trouble.”

Bud sat the coffee down and picked up the little radio. “I’ll take it, Betty,” he said, then went on, “Plow Extra Two, do you read Spearfish Lake? What’s the problem, Gene?”

“Read you weakly,” Ballard replied. “Your 303 isn’t pulling. The engine is running all right, but it isn’t generating anything. Are we clear to return to Spearfish Lake?”

“Where are you?” Bud asked loudly.

“Right about where we almost hit,” came the reply.

“How about trying for Warsaw on just the 9608?” Bud asked. “If you don’t make it there in three hours or so, the Rock ought to be dry enough by then to come out and take you the rest of the way.”

There was a moment’s silence while Ballard and Lee talked this one over. Finally, Lee responded, “Negative, Bud. The 9608 isn’t strong enough to haul the train, push the 303, and plow snow too. We’d have to double most of the way, and Harold and I are getting too beat to do that.”

“Come on back, then,” Bud said, resigned to defeat again. “Give us a call if you have trouble.”

Rick had heard the exchange over the sound of Bud’s frying steak. Now, he came out of the kitchen and commented, “Not another one!”

“Guess so,” Bud replied, “Maybe it’s something simple, even though we don’t have part one for the Chessie up here.” He turned to the radio again. “Ed, do you have a radio going in the shop?”

A few moments of silence went by. Ed had been leaving a radio on in the shop all along, but Bud suspected that he might have turned it off in order to be able to concentrate on the injectors. Bud repeated the call, then after a moment said into the radio, “Betty, grab John and have him go out to the shop and give Ed a call.”

“You’re running out of engines, aren’t you?” Rick commented.

“I guess maybe,” Bud agreed. “The only thing I can think of is to lighten up Plow Extra Two and have the 9608 head on up to Warsaw, anyway. If it craps out, maybe Walt can come and get it with the Milwaukee, or maybe I can go and get it with the Rock, after it dries out a bit.”

Rick shook his head, then left for a minute to check Bud’s steak. When he came back, he had another question. “What about the train the Dirty and Old is sending up through Kremmling? They ought to be able to keep you going.”

“It would, if it ever gets to Warsaw,” Bud replied. “I’m beginning to think it was a waste of time and money. The last we heard was about two this afternoon. They were sitting in Rochester with their plow busted again. They’ve spent more time sitting than they have running. It’ll be a miracle if they get here by this time next week, at that rate.”

“You could use them, couldn’t you?”

“You bet I could,” Bud said, dreaming. “I could do a lot of things with some good power. I could set two engines on the Warsaw run. I could leave enough power with the scram train to really be able to scram. The hospital has some stuff they’re low on, and I could almost send a train to Camden for that, and for firefighting foam, which they could use on the fertilizer plant up in Warsaw. Believe me, I can find enough for them to do, but without the power, I’ve got to concentrate on what’s most important.”

Ed’s voice now came onto the little radio, with a slight edge on it. He didn’t like being pulled away from his high-concentration chore. Bud briefly explained the situation with Plow Extra Two, then said, “What’s the chances of taking the Rock back up to Warsaw?”

“Forget it,” the mechanic said. “It’s been on heat long enough now that it’ll probably make it to Warsaw without doing any damage, but then you’ll want to come back here with an ambulance run or something. You wouldn’t make it. It’s got to have another four hours of heat, at least.”

“It would make it to Warsaw, though?” Bud asked.

“Don’t get any bright ideas. I’d be happier with eight hours of heat, and it’ll probably take more than that to get it back in top shape.”

“How about if we slap the Rock’s fuel pump on the 1478?”

“Won’t work, at least not tonight,” the radio squawked. “Different bolt patterns; at least, different from the Burlington’s. It’d take machine shop work to match them up?”

“Are the pump parts going to match up?”

“Too early to tell,” the mechanic responded. The radio was silent for a moment.

Betty’s voice interrupted the discussion. “Bud,” she said, “The Coldwater department just arrived.”

Now there was even more that ought to go to Warsaw, Bud thought. “Get ’em over to the loading ramp and get ’em loaded,” he told Betty. “I don’t know how long it’s going to be before we have power to take them, but they might as well be ready when we do.”

Now Penny joined in the radio discussion.

“Bud, we could take the Rock, if we make up our minds ahead of time that it’s going to have to stay in Warsaw for at least twelve hours. The Milwaukee and the 9608 could do the ambulance runs.”

Bud let it turn over in his mind for a moment. “Sounds reasonable,” he said. “How about it, Ed?”

“Oh, hell, you’re going to do it, whether I think you should or not. Just be damn sure you put heat on those trucks for twelve hours up there before you have to move it again.”

“All right,” Bud replied. “I’ll be over as soon as I finish eating. John, find Roger and have him get started with the loading, then you start yanking those heaters off.”

At least Fred Linder had gotten some rest, for while he slept, the situation in Warsaw had turned for the worse. He roared past the burning fertilizer plant on his snowmobile, and up Main Street to where the fire had broken yet another line.

Warsaw’s downtown section was mostly concentrated around the corner of Main and Second Streets, with the few stores in the town about halfway down the block to Third Street from Second. There was a house on fire in the middle of the block, and just to the north, Cargill’s Laundromat was blazing furiously. Masterfield had pulled Albany River around the corner from their position on Second Street, and the department was fighting stubbornly against the laundromat fire.

The fire in the laundry wasn’t bad by itself, but just to the north of it was one of the town’s two gas stations. With the wind out of the north, there was no great danger of the fire being blown into the gas station, but the place was so volatile that there was no choice but to protect it. Here was another place that Linder and the assembled departments had to guard if they were to save the town. Over the past day, the various departments had fought a good many desperate battles, and had lost most of them. This one, they stood a chance of winning.

Linder thought hard about supporting Albany River. He could think better, now that he had some sleep. About his only choice was some department out in the backfield. Blair, Lynchburg, and Spearfish Lake were all on the various streets off Herkimer and Third, and they’d been having a rough time with spot fires set by embers still being blown from Yard 4 and the various burning buildings. With the oil company right behind them, he didn’t dare tap any of them. About the only choice left was Hoselton, up on Herkimer Street next to Blair; the wind had now swung far enough around that he could probably risk it.

All of this thought process only took Fred Linder a few seconds; then, he was off on his snowmobile, over to where the Hoselton department sat waiting. Wally Borck had been expecting the call for some minutes now, and the department was already pretty well picked up. Within minutes, the little department had swung into line next to Albany River.

Here, as had happened so many times before, Don Kuralt arrived with his bulldozer to make the difference. There was snow all over the place, of course, and Kuralt had been clearing out the streets so that the departments would have a place to work. In places on some of the streets, the snow was so deep that the county plows Bud Ellsberg had brought had difficulty getting through; only the bulldozer and the frontloader that fortunately had been sitting outside Northern Fertilizer could clear out those drifts.

Kuralt plowed snow several feet deep over the underground fuel tanks, giving them a fireproof insulating layer, and he gently piled snow around the gas pumps, which had been turned off and had their valves closed.

Now, the main danger was over at the gas station. Though it would be hard for the fire to get to the several thousand gallons of gasoline, there was still danger left from the various drums of oil, snowmobile gas, and a good many other flammables that could still cause a hot fire.

Farther down the street, next to the laundromat, the house fire was going strong. Linder’s own Warsaw department was fighting this one, but there obviously wasn’t much hope of winning, with the strong wind and the laundry burning next to it. On the south, Warsaw was trying to keep the house fire from spreading to the house south of it, while Meeker was guarding the west side of the houses farther to the south.

Linder didn’t see much hope of keeping the whole side of the block south of the gas station from going. He had seen three streets of houses burn out once they got going, over the course of the last day, and there wasn’t much hope for saving the fourth.

But they might still have some hope of holding the fire to the west side of Main Street. Main Street was wider than Plains Street, and the wind was more out of the north than it had been earlier. The day before, when they had been trying to save the houses on Winter Street, the wind had been much more from the east, with the fiercely blazing Yard 4 right across the street.

If the fire got across Main Street, they did have problems. The wind would then be right out of the north, pushing the fire toward the oil company and those thousands of gallons of propane. The firefighters had seen two propane explosions in the past few hours, and one of them had injured several firefighters. It didn’t take any imagination to understand what all those thousands of gallons of propane could do. But, to win this battle, Linder needed another department or two, and just now there wasn’t one left that could be safely stripped from the job it was on to help out along Main Street.

Several times now, help had come up the railroad just when it was needed. Hoping against hope, Linder realized that it had been some time since Ellsberg had wanted to know if he could work on engines. Might Plow Extra One be right outside of town, bringing the reserves he needed so badly?

It was after one in the morning when the combined trains set out from Spearfish Lake once again. Plow Extra Two was no more; its plow was pointing westward at the end of the train, and the only part of its power that was left was the ancient 9608, now coupled to the Rock, which was once again pushing the big plow eastward.

This was the largest train to set out for Warsaw in some time, since Blair and Lynchburg had been hauled in the day before. Behind the big plow, there was the oldish blue and white Geep, a first-generation product of the diesel era, and the downright ancient Baldwin, a survivor of that era and of more modern steam engines as well. The train was a motley collection of cars, most built for other purposes but pressed into service anyway, as all the rescue runs had been.

First, there was the Baldwin’s coal gondola, now partly empty. Then, there was the C&SL way car, which had been rudely turned into an ambulance and had saved a goodly number of lives. After that was the D&O way car, filled with Camden firefighters and a handful of other rescuers, including Sally Keller, who was still intent on succoring Warsaw’s homeless still remaining, as almost all of them had long been removed to Spearfish Lake. This was followed by two red box cars, one with the mountain goat logo of the long-vanished Great Northern still on its side, carrying a load of relief supplies, spare hose, and other firefighting gear. Behind this was a flat car, with a Camden school bus on it, loaded with Camden and Coldwater firemen and a state fire marshal who was gratefully asleep. This was followed by six more flat cars, the first two holding Camden Fire Department snorkel trucks and air compressors; the compressors weren’t really needed in Warsaw, now, but no one had thought to unload them. The next four flat cars carried the most recent arrivals, the apparatus (less one antique pumper) of the Coldwater Volunteer Fire Department. Trailing the whole thing was the little plow, once rescued from a scrap heap, paying for itself many times over in the last day.

Up ahead of it all, John Penny stared out of the cupola of the Big Plow, as he had done on so many trips before. There was nothing new to see, and there were drifts in all of the places he had come to expect, and new ones in places that he hadn’t seen them before. The big plow handled either kind easily.

“How’s it going?” Bud called back to the 9608, which had had the Burlington’s radio rudely grafted onto it in the few minutes the engine had been stopped in Spearfish Lake.

“Fine,” Lee reported. “Best I’ve seen it since I met this train.”

In the cab of the blue Geep, Bud and Gene Ballard sipped at coffee. This was proving to be probably the most uneventful run Bud had made since the storm started, as Plow Extra One headed through the pine flats north of Spearfish Lake, down the long grade into the Spearfish River swamp, and across the long fill through the swamps where the plowing had been easy on earlier trips. It was easy now, and when the Rock’s nose pointed slightly upward at the end of the fill, it hardly slowed down the flood of stories being told of the last few days.

“The Hoselton crossing is a few miles past the top of this grade,” Bud told his companion. “We’ll have to stop there and put on gas masks. We’ll be into the toxic smoke not long after. We don’t dare duck through the smoke without them, or we’d be making an ambulance run right back down to Spearfish Lake.”

“They must have been tough to fight a fire in,” Ballard commented.

“It’s not so bad, now,” Bud replied. “There wasn’t much that was on fire in the smoke cloud, the last time I was there. Yesterday morning, all of the firefighting had to be done in that kind of stuff. I guess they’re gaining that much ground.”

Fred Linder was losing ground again, but at least this was ground that he hadn’t expected to save. Warsaw and Meeker had lost the battle to keep the fire from spreading south from the burning house south of the laundromat. After the fire hall called Spearfish Lake, the news about made him give up hope for the street on the west side. It had turned out that the train had troubles, but they were on their way now, with Coldwater and two snorkels from the Camden Fire Department. Linder wasn’t sure of the best place to put the snorkels, but they’d probably prove most useful on Main Street. If the fire ever got to the oil company, he’d be downright glad to have them. But they’d only left Spearfish Lake minutes before he’d called, and that had been an hour ago. It would take the train at least another hour to get there, and unless they got lucky the whole block would be ablaze by then.

The wind was out of the north-northeast by now, and if they could hold the fire that had started earlier on the west side of Main Street and keep it from spreading across the street, and if Blair and Spearfish Lake could deal with the stubborn spot fire on Herkimer Street that they had been fighting with tanker water for a couple of hours now, and if the wind would get around ever farther to the north, and if none of the little spot fires that had been springing up near the oil company got out of hand, and if the overheated pump bearing at the city water plant continued to hold out, as it had held out since the main plant fire started, and if a few other things, then the end might just be in sight. But, if any one of those things went wrong, they still could lose most of the town.

As always, the key seemed to be in the main fire line, now on Main Street. Linder spent most of his time there, in the hours after midnight, but this didn’t keep him and his snowmobile from occasionally appearing at the oil company, where Kremmling had held the western perimeter against the fertilizer plant fire for more than a day, or at the spot fires at Herkimer Street, where Blair and Lynchburg and Spearfish Lake were struggling to keep things under control.

Although Linder knew that more help was coming, he had begun to be a bit suspicious of more help. It always seemed like things got worse when help got there, spreading the lines even thinner and making the need for even more help just as imperative.

While Bud waited for gas masks to be distributed from the box car, he called ahead to Walt. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“They’re back to Main Street,” the Milwaukee’s engineer answered. “We’ve got another ambulance run waiting.”

“It’s going to have to be really serious,” Bud told him. “We’re hurting for power. I’ll talk it over with you and Linder when I get there.”

Here was the problem that he had been dreading, and sooner than he’d hoped. The Rock was clearly out of it for an ambulance run, and the other two engines were only usable together, and if the danger of using the scram train wasn’t too high. But there were only two tired men left who knew how to run the 9608, one of them well into his seventies. An ambulance run now would have to be pretty desperate.

Bud thought about walking back to the 9608, to get a feel of how much more he could ask of Stevens and Lee, but a strange voice on the radio interrupted him: “Any Camden and Spearfish Lake unit at Warsaw, this is Decatur and Overland Snowplow Extra 3217.”

To reach him on VHF they had to be close!

With a tear of relief in his eye, Bud carefully keyed the VHF microphone again. “Snowplow Extra 3217, this is Bud Ellsberg on Plow Extra One. Glad you could make it. I’ve got an ambulance run to go out, and I haven’t got an engine left that can make it to Spearfish Lake by itself.”

“Afraid we can’t help you just yet,” the voice replied from the D&O train. “Our plow is dead again. We’re going to back up to Walsenberg and try to fix it, but it may take a while.”

Disappointment crashed down on Bud. In a defeated voice he asked, “Where are you at?”

“Can’t tell you the milepost. They’re all buried, and our people have forgotten what signs are where. We’re sitting on the trestle over the Spearfish River east of Warsaw.”

They were close indeed – just on the other side of Grant’s cut, the worst snowcatcher on the line. “How far into the cut did you get?” Bud asked over the intervening few miles.

“Couple hundred yards, maybe a little more.”

“We got into the other side of it maybe two or three hundred yards yesterday morning,” Bud replied, his mind churning. He didn’t want to let two Geeps slip through his fingers. “The going got tough,” he went on, “and there wasn’t any need for us to press on then. That leaves only two or three hundred yards or so. You guys stay where you are. We’ll come and get you.”

Walt had been monitoring this exchange, and now he called Bud. “You know damn well we almost got stuck in that thing yesterday.”

“Right,” Bud replied. “But I’ve been talking to the people from Plow Extra Two. They had to dig out any number of times with snow shovels. We’ve got the snow shovels, and there are enough people to dig with them. Let’s go for it.”

It had been Steve Cziller in the cab of the 3217 who had called Bud, when he’d heard him talking to Walt. Anson and the two mechanics were with him. “Jesus,” the road foreman told them. “We’ve seen that cut, and they’ve seen it, too. They must need us bad.”

“You heard them,” Anson said. “Apparently everything they’ve got is on its last legs. They’ve got a great, big blade plow, though. They might be able to make it through with that.”

“Bullshit,” Pickering said. “I was in the middle of it. It’s at least fourteen feet deep there, and it gets worse farther in. I was beginning to wonder if we could chew through it ourselves.”

“Bud, you are crazy as hell,” Walt said. “Dig through that thing? You looked up that cut yourself. There must be eighteen, twenty feet of snow back there in spots.”

Ballard was standing next to Walt. “We buried your other plow several times down there by Thunder Lake, and a couple times after that. We dug out and made it up here. We can do it again.”

“I still say, you haven’t seen this son of a bitch,” Walt said, “But, if you’re so damn determined, then let’s give it a try.”

“That’s the spirit,” Bud said, turning to look at the flat cars, which were being rapidly unloaded. Fred Linder had already called for the units to go directly to the main fire line at Third and Main. “After last morning,” Bud went on, “I don’t think we’d better have anybody on the plow. Maybe we can unload your snowmobile off the Rock’s running board, and have Gene or John ride it out to spot for us.”

“You want to couple the 9608 into the plow train, too,” the engine’s owner asked.

“Not if we can help it, Bill,” Bud said. “You can haul the bus flats out to the cut separately. We won’t use the 9608 unless we don’t have power enough to punch through with the diesels. Walt, have someone get in touch with Fred Linder, and have him get every spare hand he can come up with onto the buses, and every shovel they can lay their hands on. Not firemen, but I know there’s a shitload of non-firefighters wandering around town.”

“We’ve got maybe seventy-five or a hundred shovels in the box car,” Ballard said.

“Good. We’ll use them, but bring some more.”

It took the railroad men in Warsaw a lot less time to plan the operation than it took to organize it. Most of the trouble came from rounding up three or four busloads of shovelers at four in the morning. They started out with perhaps fifty people already sleeping in the buses, and Bud wanted at least a hundred more.

While the “volunteers” were straggling in two or three at a time, Fred Linder rode his snowmobile over to the idling Rock. “What about this ambulance run I just heard about?” he asked.

“It’ll have to wait,” Bud told him. “But it would have had to wait, anyway. That’s why we need the power that’s over on the other side of the cut.”

Linder shrugged. “Well, if you’ve got to, you’ve got to. I’d better get back over to Main Street and get those Camden guys working before they try and take over the whole damn show.”

Not even the most determined poker players were left on SX-3217. As Plow Extra One headed west out of Warsaw, most of the train’s crew, with every shovel the train carried, were out slowly clawing at the drift from their end. Cziller led a little group to the top of the drift, and all of a sudden saw a snowmobile’s headlight wallowing toward them. The snowmobile came up to where they were digging in the 3217’s headlight, and stopped. “You guys from SX-3217?” the snowplow rider asked.

“Sure are. Steve Cziller’s the name.”

“John Penny, from the C&SL, and Conrail before that.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Spotting,” Penny replied. “I’ve ridden that plow since the beginning of this, but we decided that it was not a real bright idea here.”

“They very far away?”

“Just leaving now. I rode out ahead to see what we were going to be up against. I’d better get back. You want to ride along?”

“Sure,” Cziller replied, getting on the back of the snowmobile. Penny twisted the throttle, and the little machine began to hum as he headed back up the cut. “How are things going with the fire?” Cziller shouted over Penny’s shoulder.

“Haven’t heard much for a while, but I guess there’s a chance they may be able to save the rest of the town.”

“You’ve been busy?”

“Damn straight,” Penny replied. “Of the eleven fire departments over there, we hauled in eight of them. We’d kind of given up on you people.”

“We’d kind of given up ourselves,” Cziller reflected. “For that matter, we haven’t made it yet. I heard Ellsberg talking about the 9608 on the radio. Is Bill Lee with it?”

“Sure is.”

“We’d better not tell him right now,” Cziller said, “But his daughter was hurt when their Alco derailed. She was bringing us parts for our plow. Last we heard, one of our brakemen had walked out through the storm to get help.”

“We won’t have a chance now, anyway,” Penny replied. “Here they come.”

The tracks east of Warsaw had drifted up fairly badly since the Burlington and the Milwaukee had been over them the morning before, but not so badly that the two diesels couldn’t plow up to the edge of Grant’s Cut in one pass.

The plan had been to clear the way for the 9608 to bring up the trainload of shovelers, but since the old 2-6-0 was lagging behind, Bud couldn’t resist backing off and making a short run at the unbroken snow. Neither of the two diesels were pulling very hard by now, and Bud didn’t think that they had enough power to get deep enough to get stuck.

The Rock and the Milwaukee hit the drifts with about the speed that had been used the night before, and they knifed perhaps thirty yards past the point where Bud had called it off.

Once the snow finally brought the train to a stop, Penny called over the portable. “Good run,” he said, “But it’s deep. I can just barely see the top of the plow.”

“All right, Walt,” Bud ordered. “Back down.”

The two engines growled, but in both of the cabs slip indicators wailed. “Let’s take slack forward and try again,” Walt suggested.

The two engines moved forward the few inches that they could muster, then backed down again. Smoke rolled from both exhaust stacks, and even from the Rock Bud could hear the Milwaukee’s diesel wind up and shriek louder than it ever had before. The train didn’t move.

“Idle down,” Bud ordered. “All right,” Bud ordered the 9608. “Bring them up.”

While the small army of snow shovelers was digging away and starting to carve a trench up the cut, Lee looked at the old NW2, entirely unaware of the bad news that awaited him a few yards away. His verdict was quick. For the third time in a day, he pronounced last rites over an engine. “Bus bar’s burnt out. Must have leaned on it too hard. It’s not getting power to either truck. Probably not hard to fix, but there’d be no way to do it here.”

Bud agreed. “She’s dead weight, now. Let’s not shut her down and drain her here, though; we can wait until we get back to Warsaw. If everybody’s off the consist, you might as well back it up a ways. I guess we’ll want you to couple up for the next run.”

Lee backed the old Baldwin up the tracks, and Bud radioed to his brakeman, “How are they coming on the plow?”

From the back of Walt’s snowmobile, Penny replied, “I think you’re loose already.”

“Right,” Bud said. “We’ll try to pull out as soon as the 9608 gets back.”

A few minutes later, the attention of the snow shovelers was diverted as the diesel and the old steamer belched noise and smoke, while the plow slowly backed out of the cut. “That’ll do it for now,” Bud radioed. “We’ll sit here until some digging gets done.”

Slowly, a narrow notch appeared in the middle of the deep snow of the cut, for there were nearly two hundred people out there, shoveling at about as many yards of deep snow.

Some of the people were Warsaw people. Many of these were men who had worked at Jerusalem Paper. They were without jobs now, and that would be a problem, but for a moment, that didn’t matter.

Some of the people with snow shovels were people who had come to Warsaw to help. Most of the able-bodied men from Hoselton were there, and so was a large part of the National Guard artillery battery from Spearfish Lake. The most recent arrivals were there, too, the crew of SX-3217.

In the blinding snow, it seemed to each shoveler a rather hopeless task, but their combined effort was moving a lot of snow. In time, Bud Ellsberg and Gene Ballard walked up the first part of the cut to inspect the progress.

“What do you think?” Bud asked.

“Worth a try,” the D&O man replied. “It beats sitting around doing nothing. Let’s just take it real easy. We’ll have a lot of momentum, but not much power.”

A few minutes later, Bud ordered the plow train back. Once he had a little room, he gently shoved the big plow forward. It bit into the snow where it had been stuck, and the train sagged to a stop. “You gained a little,” was Penny’s verdict. “Try it again.”

Bud tried again. The combined power of the old diesel and the ancient steamer took another bite at the cut, and gained perhaps another ten yards.

Each few yards that they gained meant that much less that had to be shoveled out, and they slowly began to compress the line of snow shovelers into a solid mass. Soon, they were getting more dug out in front of them, and they could gain more ground with each pass.

Steve Cziller and John Penny paralleled each pass of the plow as it worked. There was a long way to go at ten, then twelve, then fifteen yards at a run, and each run took some time to set up. An hour dragged by, then more, but each run went a little farther than the one before.

Bud would back the train up on the Rock’s power alone, then whistle the train forward with its metallic air horn. His order would be replied to with the deep-throated, romantic steam whistle of the old Baldwin as its power joined internal combustion and electricity to shove the plow forward once again.

At last there came a run where the diesel bellowed and the old Baldwin panted as the plow knifed through the cut. They had barely enough speed and barely enough power, and they nearly stalled again before they broke out onto ground that had been cleared by SX-3217’s rotary a few hours before.

Behind the Rock, Bill Lee and Harold Stevens felt the going ease, and they cut the power to the 9608. In the Rock, Bud didn’t take off all the power.

Finally feeling triumphant, he let Plow Extra One drift forward. Penny called off the distance, and Bud let the train creep forward until he stopped it with the point of the big plow barely touching the lip of the D&O rotary.

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