Chapter 10

0322 1/9 - 0837 1/9: Decatur and Overland Snowplow Extra 3217
Lordston Northern Extra 451

At a minimum, it would take some welding to get the rotary snowplow going again. It might have been possible to scrounge up a piece of metal of some kind or another somewhere on the train, but Cziller was sure that there hadn't been any welding gear included in the tools that had been loaded on board. "We obviously can't fix it here," he told Hottel and Anson, and DeTar, who had by now joined them.

"What do you think?" the conductor asked. "Back to Lordston, or go clear back to Putnam?"

"I don't want to go back to Putnam," Cziller replied. "You remember what that stretch from Atlanta was like. The way it's blowing, it could be packed too tight to get through by now. Even if it isn't, it's a hell of a long way. We'll lose hours, maybe as much as a day if we got back to Putnam. Spike, that's not all that difficult to fix, is it?"

"Don't know for sure," the mechanic replied. "Probably hanging a new weight on there ought to be simple enough. Bringing the wheel to a balance, though... well, it might be fairly simple, and it might not be. My guess is that if we got the size of metal about right and the location same as before, it ought to be pretty close. Maybe close enough to fake it, if we can stop every now and then to take a leak."

"Harry, do you know if that little tourist outfit at Lordson has any shop facilities to speak of?"

"Don't know for sure," the engineer replied. "You'd think they would have something or other if they work on that steamer up there, but they rebuilt it down in Camden, I know. But, they won't be open. That's a family operation, and they probably haven't been at the shop since the storm started."

Cziller's attention was diverted by the sound of a snowmobile coming up beside the train. "Now what the hell would anyone be out in this shit at this hour on a snowmobile for?"

The snowmobile came to a stop by the little group of men standing beside the plow. "Got trouble?" the driver asked as he got off the machine.

Cziller walked over to him, and the other trainmen followed. "Yeah, we're trying to get up to that fire in Warsaw, but our plow is busted." he said. "Threw a balance weight. You from Lordston?"

"Yeah," the driver said.

"Is there any place we could get some welding gear to work on it?"

"Well, the driver said, "You're welcome to run it into my shop."

"Your shop?" Cziller asked.

"Yeah, my shop," the snow machine driver said. "I'm Bill Lee. I own the Lordston Northern, along with the bank."

Cziller ached to ask just why Lee would be out on his snowmobile on the rail grade when it was pushing four in the morning, but decided that it wouldn't be the right time, just now. "Sounds good to me," he said, still wondering why Lee had shown up at that precise instant.

"Look," Lee said. "It's about five miles back to Lordston. I'll run ahead of you, and make a couple of calls, get some people out of bed."

"If it's all the same to you," Cziller said, "If you're going to run on the tracks, I'd just as soon you were behind us. West of us, I mean."

"That's what I meant," Lee said. "Except when we get to the county road crossing, I'll go down the road and get ahead of you."

"Let's get moving," Cziller agreed.

Lee turned to his snow machine, which was still idling, while the railroad men climbed up to the cab of the 3217. Once in the cab, Cziller told DeTar, "I want you to be spotting out the back, even though you can't see much. That doesn't mean trying to get your money back from the section gang."

"Hey," DeTar protested. "I may be twenty bucks down, but I know better than that."

Lee was nowhere to be found when SX 3217 pulled to a stop outside the Lordston Northern office, but his daughter, Diane was.

Diane Lee, Bill's daughter, had a sweet smile. She was perhaps twenty-three, small and slender, with long red hair that fell past her shoulders, and a sweet voice. Cziller hoped that his brakeman, Bruce Page, wouldn't see her; he'd be lovesick for the rest of the trip.

"Dad headed back on down the tracks to Meeker," Diane explained. "He wants to try and catch the 9608 there."

"The 9608?" Cziller asked, puzzled. "What's that?"

"That's our steam engine. We're storing it for the winter in the Camden and Spearfish Lake's engine shed in Camden, so we can keep the Alco here. The C&SL is trying to run a plow train north from Camden, and they took the 9608 with them to carry relief supplies. Dad didn't want to let that trip get past him. Anyway, he told me to do anything we could to help you out. What can we do for you?"

"Well, Miss Lee, what we need is to have someone get some welding gear and do some welding on our plow."

She smiled again; Helen of Troy must have had such a smile, Cziller thought. "I really don't know how to weld that well," she said. "But there's a tractor mechanic that lives right up the street that has a portable welding rig. If your people would like to pull the Alco outside, you can run your plow into the shed while I give him a call."

"That would be a big help, Miss Lee."

"Oh, call me Diane. Tell your people that the Alco starts hard, like any Alco, so be sure to have the APU warmed up before you even try to get it going."

Cziller agreed and started for the door, thinking that for a sweet young kid she sure seemed to know a bit about the dirty side of railroading. That really seemed out of place, neat and delicate as she was -- even after being turned out of bed on this blizzard night. But, she was the owner's daughter, after all, and she worked around the place. She probably couldn't help bing exposed to the greasy stuff.

He went back to the way car, where DeTar had reassumed his assault on coming out even. "Anyone here know how to run an Alco S-1?" the road foreman asked.

Bartenslager stared at his cards for a moment, then said, "I ran S-2s a while."

"Good," Cziller replied. "The little lady says to pull theirs out and leave it running, and we can work on the plow inside."

"Might as well do it," the engineer replied. "They're dealing me nothing but shit, anyway."

Fixing the plow proved to not be as simple as Hottel had thought that it might be. It was an easy job for Ken Sawyer, the tractor mechanic, to cut a piece of iron to replace the missing weight, but with the plow in the shop it seemed wise to go over it a little more thoroughly. It was well that they did, for they found a crack in a blade, down near the hub, and there were other loose pieces here and there.

"It's going to take hours to reweld everything right," the tractor mechanic told Cziller. "Then, I guarantee you, when we get done the son of a bitch won't balance up. Your man Hottel tells me that balancing that thing is kind of a process of guess and change, guess and change."

"Look, you guys," the road foreman replied. "The longer we screw around here, the more that little town up there burns. Just do a quick job and we'll get out of here. We can risk a little vibration."

"We can like hell," Hottel replied. "I checked that blade before we left Putnam. It wasn't cracked then. Just the couple minutes vibration when we pitched the balance weight must have been what cracked it. Unless we go through this thing right, we'll never get there. We can do a quick job, but you'd better plan on being the one in the cupola of this thing when a blade lets go."

Every instinct that Cziller had was to press on and risk more trouble from the plow, but Hottel was speaking common sense. That got through. At least here, they had some facilities to work on the plow. If something went wrong farther north, then any fixes would have to be made out in the weather, if they could even reach a place where help was available at all. "All right," you guys," the disappointed man told the mechanics. "Fix it right, but make it as quick as you can. I guess I'd better go over to the office and tell Diane... um, Miss Lee, that we're probably going to be all morning."

The redhead was at work on some bookkeeping; it was a way to kill some time during these predawn hours. "How's it going out there, Mr. Cziller?" she asked.

"Call me Steve," he replied. "It's not going well. They've discovered more trouble. If looks like we're going to be hours, yet. I hope you won't mind our keeping you around."

"No problem," she told him. "I can sleep later. I'm just glad to help where I can."

"I'm glad you can help us. It's just hard to sit around here when we should be making miles to the north."

She stared out the window at the storm for a while. "Maybe I can help you out some more. We've got a blade plow here, you know."

Cziller brightened. "No, I didn't know. I hadn't seen it or anything."

"It's around on the far side of the engine shed. It's not really a big plow. It's just something that Dad and Ken Sawyer rigged up ut of an old boxcar truck and an old blade from a county plow. They had to hang a lot of concrete on it to get it to balance out. It's not really a very good plow, but you could probably get as far as Rochester with it if you took your time."

"I'm sorry, Diane," he replied, disappointed. "That wouldn't be much help. We'd get up to Rochester, and then we'd need the rotary to go farther, and we'd have to come back here to get it. Then it would take us just about as long to get back to Rochester, anyway."