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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 24
0615 1/10/1981 – 0757 1/10/1981:
C&SL Snowplow Extra One
Lordston Northern Extra 9608
D&O Snowplow Extra 3217
In the hours before dawn of that snowfilled morning, two trains arrived in Warsaw from the east. The first was led by six flatcars, carrying school buses loaded with people. It was pushed by an old Baldwin 2-6-0 running backwards, followed by an idling orange and black EMC NW2 half its age, and by a blue and white EMD GP-7 that had been encased in snow and ice in its runs up and down the line for two days. The train was trailed by an ugly black snowplow the size of a small house, the ice and snow on it not covering all of the burn chars that it bore.
A few hundred yards back, the second train followed, pushing an even uglier snowplow, its two matched red-and-white GP-9s at either end, with two cabooses and four old boxcars sandwiched in between.
The long line of flatcars blocked the crossing at Plant Street. The buses on them began to empty as the snow shovelers detrained and headed for the kettles of hot coffee and hot soup that awaited them.
Bud got down from the Geep, and walked forward to the plow. As he inspected it the best he could in the dark, another figure came up to greet him. “Are you Bud Ellsberg,” the figure asked.
“I am.”
“I’m Steve Cziller. I’m in charge of SX-3217.”
“Glad to meet you, Steve,” Bud said sincerely.
“Hell of a way to have to get here, but we made it. Now that we’re here, what do you want us to do?”
It was time for Bud to let his feelings of victory go for a bit and get back to business. There was an ambulance run that still needed to be made, and the order of cars in Warsaw was now thoroughly confused. The two of them walked back to the cab of the Rock, where presently John Penny and Tom Bigelow arrived and joined them.
It took a few minutes to work out all the details. The Rock and the 9608 would stand by in Warsaw to protect the scram train, and Walt Archer could look after the Rock. One SX-3217 way car and the D&O way car from Plow Extra Two would stay with it.
Bud decided that he would ride along on SX-3217 as it returned to Spearfish Lake on the ambulance run. It would take the little plow, C&SL ambulance/way car and one of its own, along with the Milwaukee, being towed dead, several empty flatcars, and some of the other odd cars that had accumulated in Warsaw. The rotary would be shoved onto a siding and forgotten for now.
Switching everything around took a little while, but Bud was perfectly ready to sip coffee in the dining car with Steve Cziller while Penny supervised all of the shuffling.
Eventually, Frank Matson caught Bud’s attention and motioned him outside. “I’m going back to Spearfish Lake and study those survival figures that Betty prepared,” Bud told him. “What was it that you wanted to talk to me about a little while ago?”
“This is important, and it’s confidential,” Matson replied. “It’s even more confidential with all of these D&O people around. I got to talking with C.J. Greene, the chief of the Kremmling Fire Department, right after you left the last time.”
“So?”
“So it seems that Greene is also the superintendent for Big Pit. You know the aggregate quarry down there.”
“Yeah?” Bud replied, getting more interested.
“So it seems that the D&O just jacked their freight rates sky high a couple weeks ago, and they’re already paying a hell of a lot more than we’re charging on the traffic from Summit Pit. We’ve got nothing on paper yet, but we’ve tentatively agreed to match Summit Pit rates on haulage from Big Pit.”
“Glad you haven’t got anything on paper,” Bud replied. “I was talking to Steve Cziller there for a while. The Kremmling branch is totally unusable. It was only good luck and frozen ground that got them over it at all.”
“That’s the beautiful part,” Matson replied. “Big Pit owns the line down to the switch for the Kremmling branch, and Green thinks that they jacked the rates up on him because they want to abandon the line north of Rochester.”
“We’ve heard that from the D&O down in Decatur before,” Bud snorted. “Abandon a customer with a lot of carloadings to cut costs. But we still don’t have any money to fix up the branch.”
“Oh, but we will,” Matson said. “They’ve agreed to a surcharge on our rates that matches the D&O’s new rates, for three years, so we can fix up the line. They want to talk a very long term contract.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Bud said. “Marks will shit when he finds out, but if they’re trying to get rid of a customer, it serves them right. We’ve done all right on lines they thought were worthless, and we can do it some more. I just want it understood that this whole thing isn’t just a ploy to bludgeon the D&O.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Matson said. “We’re talking short term, the same rates. Green has watched us support this town with everything we have, and that makes him think that he’ll get better service in the long run with us.”
“I will be damned,” Bud said. “I thought we were going to be selling the Burlington, at least. Guess we can’t do that, now. All of that business is going to be in the summer, and we’re going to be busier than hell. The winter is going to be dead, though.”
“Maybe not.” Matson lowered his voice even more. “I don’t know much about this yet. You know that Jerusalem Paper was going to shut the plant down, anyway, mainly because it was old and worn out. Now that they don’t have it, they have insurance money, a trained work force, and support from the local bank, meaning me. They’ve also been offered an even better break on freight rates for increased traffic. Marshall thinks that there’s a chance – a long shot, but a chance – that they might build a modern, high-capacity plant here.”
“Double damned,” Bud said. “I’ll kick those thoughts around quietly while I’m going over Betty’s stuff.”
“Try to make it back here this afternoon,” Matson replied. “Marshall has a teleconference set up for this morning. We might know more later.”
“Will do,” Bud said, “If the trains run right.”
Bud could see from the state of the switching that SX-3217 was getting about ready to leave. He’d promised to ride in the cab of the 3217 to show Cziller and Bartenslager and Anson the route to Spearfish Lake and explain its limitations. As he walked toward the waiting GP-9, he found a couple of men struggling to unload a snowmobile from one of the bus flatcars.
The two men proved to be Cziller and Bill Lee. “What’s going on?” Bud asked.
“His daughter got hurt helping us get up here,” the D&O man replied. “She was a big help, too. Now, he’s going to ride down the Kremmling branch to Coldwater, where she’s in the hospital.”
“That’s dumb,” Bud said. “Leave that thing on there until we get to Spearfish Lake. Then you can ride right down the state road to Coldwater. It’s a hell of a lot shorter, and if you run into trouble, there are houses along the way.”
“All right,” Lee said. “But we’ve still got to get it off of here. This car is staying here.”
The three of them struggled with the heavy snowmobile. Lee had ridden it from Lordston to Meeker to catch up with his old Baldwin. If he hadn’t made that ride, there was a good chance that neither Plow Extra Two nor SX-3217 would have gotten through at all. In a few minutes, they had the snowmobile loaded on a flat car headed for Spearfish Lake.
“Bill, I know you’re worried,” Cziller said. “If you want to take your mind off of things, there’ll be a poker game going on in the way car.”
Lee smiled. “I haven’t been in a good poker game in a long time.”
As Lee climbed up into the D&O way car, Cziller told Bud, “That poker game has been going on since we started. It had something like eighty-four bucks in it when it started, and that eighty-four bucks has been in most of the pockets on this train. That’s the first new money that it’ll have seen.”
“You got some serious poker players there,” Bud replied, knowing that he’d be straining to keep a poker face of his own for the next few hours.
The two of them walked toward the cab of the 3217, which was idling softly in the predawn darkness with snow blowing all around it. They passed the Milwaukee, sitting dead and cold. “We’re taking our mechanics, too,” Cziller told Bud. “Maybe they can help get something from your dead line in Spearfish Lake working.”
The two of them climbed into the waiting GP-9. Jim Bartenslager was standing there. “Bud,” Steve said, “I’d like you to meet one of the finest young throttle hands I’ve seen in a long time.”
“Pleased to meet you,” the engineer said. “Steve, are we about ready to go?”
“Guess so,” Cziller said. “Check with Bigelow and Penny; they’ll know.”
Moments later, SX-3217 was heading down the tracks toward Spearfish Lake. The snow blowing across the tracks in a dead crosswind was lighted in a soft, predawn light.
Bud and Steve fell to talking about the past couple of days, and were totally engrossed in storytelling when Bartenslager looked back over his shoulder and piped up: “Jesus, would you look at that! That may be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Steve Cziller and Bud Ellsberg stood up, and each of them looked out of a different cab window of the 3217.
Back behind the train, red and layered and swollen, but looking like it meant it, the sun was coming up.
The storm was over.
Epilogue
1430 8/17/1982:
C&SL Snowplow Extra One
The pine trees off to the south of the tracks shimmered in the heat waves of the August afternoon. There was an impressive amount of skin and sweat in the crowd surrounding the unique but appropriate speaker’s platform, for most of the population of Warsaw and a lot of firefighters and other interested people from other towns had come to this ceremony.
Bruce Marshall was speaking: “It’s no secret now that the fire was a blessing of sorts to the people of Warsaw, for the destruction of the old plant, which had outlived its usefulness, cleared the way for Jerusalem Paper Products to construct this new, high-capacity plant here, which we have come to dedicate today. A good many people were responsible for its construction, and it’s almost impossible to name them all, but . . . ”
Marshall wasn’t a very good public speaker, and Bud’s mind wandered back to those days a year and a half before when the paper plant had been a lost cause.
The arrival of the Camden snorkel trucks and the department from Coldwater had been the reserves that Fred Linder had needed. In a desperate battle that lasted most of the morning of the tenth, Linder’s forces had managed to hold the fire to the east side of the block on Main Street. By nightfall, both the main fire and the spot fires to the west were thoroughly out.
Still, it had taken three more days before all of the fire in Warsaw followed. The final drowning of the pulp yards had been a slow process, and the quenching of the fertilizer plant had taken longer still.
The fertilizer plant fire wasn’t brought under control until Bud and Steve Cziller made up a lashup of the Rock and the two D&O GP-9s. Sloat hadn’t been able to repair the injector pumps, but Hottel managed to get the Chessie running. While it stood by Warsaw with the 9608 to power the scram train if it was needed, the three Geeps battered their way past Thunder Lake with the big plow, and returned from Camden with two boxcars of chemicals for firefighting foam, and two injector pumps. It turned out that only one boxcar load was needed before the toxic-gas danger was over, and the C&SL could again use the school bus flats to return the people of Warsaw to their homes.
As Bud had expected from the first, it had taken the D&O months to get the drawbridge at Camden fixed; indeed, it wasn’t fixed yet. After SX-3217 finally returned down the Kremmling branch, towing the 1478 and the crippled Milwaukee, which needed truck work at Putnam Yard, the Chessie became the most important engine that the C&SL owned. The little GE was light enough to make the run over the tattered Kremmling branch with a couple of cars with some degree of safety. As they hauled off partially burnt fertilizer to a sanitary landfill, hauled in new fertilizer to replace it in the plant that Chip Halsey hurriedly built outside of town, hauled traffic for transfers to the D&O’s network of branch lines on the north side of Camden and more carloads for customers along the Camden and Spearfish Lake line, the little GE was kept going day and night, crawling up and down the decrepit line.
Once the decision had been made to rebuild the paper plant, Jerusalem Paper had become concerned for its experienced work force in Warsaw, and the necessity to keep them at hand for the new plant. The company did what it could to meet the demands that the Warsaw plant had provided by starting a third shift at its Rochester plant and staffing it with Warsaw people.
It had taken metal detectors to find the buried LN Alco in its snowdrift, and a crew of men to dig it out, but Lee had it back in service to greet his daughter as she returned from the hospital, her arm and leg in casts, her back still sore, but not broken.
Bud and Bill Lee had long been friends, but now the relationship was even closer. Bud’s relationship with the D&O had deteriorated over the Big Pit business, and service to Kremmling had been terrible. Working together, Lee had been able to arrange for trackage rights between Kremmling and Whiteport. With the washout north of Haleyville repaired, Bud had a second connection to the outside world.
The third shift at Rochester couldn’t accommodate all of the Jerusalem Paper employees, and times in Warsaw had been hard for a while. With help from the Big Pit people, the state, and the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank, Bud was able to hire a good many of the unemployed men in Warsaw, and put them to work under Roger Tefke and Fred Linder fixing up the Kremmling Branch. By the time that spring came, the branch was usable if they kept the speed slow, and it had improved considerably since.
That first summer was busy indeed. Bud put the two Geeps into twenty-four-hour service, running unit trains of rock from Summit Pit and gravel from Big Pit down to the loading docks in Camden, which fortunately were north of the drawbridge.
All the extra switching in Camden brought another problem. Ralph McPhee recovered from his trip on Plow Extra Two, but both he and Harold Stevens had to admit that they were getting busier than they wanted to be. It seemed something of a risk at first, but Bud had assigned John Penny and the repaired Milwaukee to Camden, figuring that John could learn a lot from McPhee and Stevens as the old men worked turn and about. The arrangement lasted through the summer, and then both of the old timers decided that the time had come to hang it up for good.
All summer long Bud had been stretched thin for power. Once they scrabbled their way through the summer, Bud went engine shopping again. The C&SL now boasted two more engines, both multiple-unit equipped GP-7s – but somehow, neither of the new engines had acquired nicknames, yet. They doubtlessly would in time.
Councilman Jim Horton was speaking now. “This town wouldn’t have been left standing, and a lot of people wouldn’t have been here today, if it hadn’t been for the railroads. Not just the Camden and Spearfish Lake, but the Decatur and Overland and the Lordston Northern as well. Every time we looked up, it seemed, there was a train arriving with more help from outside. There was a train that evacuated our people to safety, and in our darkest hours, when everything was lost, there was a train waiting to haul the rest of us out of danger. We’ve overlooked the railroad a lot, but it was there when we needed it, no matter whose railroad it was. One of the people we have to thank the most for that is Medford Ellsberg. Bud, it’s your turn to speak.”
Bud got up and climbed slowly to the microphone while the tiny Warsaw High School Band struggled with a tune. As the strains of “The Rock Island Line” filled the air, Bud looked out into the crowd to see a lot of friends and familiar faces, such as Fred Linder, whose temporary job with the C&SL had kept the hero in town, and Rod Turpin, whose life had been saved by a fast run to Spearfish Lake, and Joe McGuinness, who had taken over a lot of Bud’s accounting and bookwork that was needed with the huge temporary work force on the Kremmling Branch. And, for that matter, two more people who wouldn’t have been there except for the railroad: Diane and Bruce Page, who had interrupted their honeymoon to drive the 9608 to Warsaw this day.
As “The Rock Island Line” died away, Bud began to speak.
“Jim was right,” he said. “There are a lot of people here today who wouldn’t be here except for the railroad.
“There’s been a lot of talk today about the heroism of the railroad people, not just us from the Camden and Spearfish Lake, but from the Lordston Northern and the Decatur and Overland, as well. I don’t like to think of it as heroism. We were just doing our jobs, and we tried to do the best we could with what we had.”
Bud looked out over the crowd from the unique, but appropriate speaker’s platform: the front platform of a blue and white GP-7, shined as it had never shone before, on whose side the lettering had been proudly restored for all to see: THE ROCK.
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