Chapter 1

0720 1/8 - 1006 1/8: Plow Extra One

"... and the snow and high winds are now expected to continue for the rest of today and tonight and into tomorrow, adding at least two more feet to the eighteen inch accumulation of snow already on the ground in the area of Camden and surrounding communities. The following schools have been closed in the Camden area..."

Bud Ellsberg could not have cared less about schools in the Camden area as he reached out from his bed to turn off the alarm clock. He was really more interested in the trains in the Spearfish Lake area. He looked out the window without throwing the covers back, and could see fresh snow blowing past, plastering itself onto trees and clogging the street, and wondered just how bad he wanted to send out the run to Warsaw today.

On a morning like this, it was just too easy to sleep in, but Bud realized he would have to get up and see just how bad it was. It had been snowing and drifting already when he and John Penny had brought the Camden turn into town the night before, and it was easy to see that it hadn't let up much all night. It was not going to be any picnic to run a train up to Warsaw today.

But then again, Bruce Marshall from the Jerusalem Paper plant at Warsaw had called at least twice yesterday about the dye loaded on piggyback trailers on the train sitting in the yard at Spearfish Lake. Ever since some idiot truck driver last fall had tried to take a 55-ton truck over the 20-ton limit bridge south of Warsaw, ending up in the Spearfish River along with most of the bridge, the plant's chemistry had been coming by piggyback, giving the little Camden and Spearfish Lake Railroad more business, but sometimes, like today, it wasn't always a blessing. They'd need their dye today or else they were going to have to shut down, but Bud wondered if they wouldn't shut down anyway, considering the weather.

The phone rang, settling any question Bud might have had about staying in his warm bed. If it rang more than about three times, his wife would be complaining about it ruining her sleep, so he faced the music, wincing as his feet hit the cold floor.

It turned out to be Betty, his elderly accountant. "I'm snowed in," she said, "Can you pick me up?"

Bud agreed that he would, and began to get dressed. "What a hell of a day to have to run a railroad," he thought.

One of the benefits of being a railroad president -- at least of a railroad the size of the Camden and Spearfish Lake -- was that Bud got to drive the railroad's four-wheel drive pickup home. Snow removal had improved in recent years in the northwoods town of Spearfish Lake, as the town had gotten away from lumbering and had become more of an industrial town, but now, even though the city plows had been out on the streets all night, it took the pickup's four wheel drive and low range for Bud to drive from his home on Railroad Street to his accountant's house, and then to the office.

Bud sometimes suspected that his quiet accountant was more the president of the railroad than he was. As often as not, he'd be out somewhere with a train, and she was the one keeping the paperwork going, the bills paid and the operations in order.

John Penny had already arrived at the office from his nearby apartment by the time that Bud and Betty arrived, and he had even shoveled out the walk up to the office door. The train that had been SLCR-22 yesterday and would be SLWR-12 today sat snowcovered on Track One, where Bud and John had cut if off the night before when they ran the two Geeps into the engine shed.

"Just hung up from talking to Walt," Penny reported. "He's snowed in bad. He said he didn't think you'd want to run the Warsaw turn today, and he's not feeling real good, anyway, so he decided to not try to make it in. If you really want him, though, he says he'll ride his snowmobile in."

Bud shrugged. "Don't know how bad I want to try it today," he said. "I'll just have to see how bad they want those chemicals up in Warsaw. Tell you what, why don't you get the blade on the truck, and see what you can do about shoving some snow off the parking lot around here? Clean her up good. We probably won't need it moved today, but if we get as much snow as they're calling for, we'll have a hell of a time cleaning it off later. Coffee hot?"

"Just started. I haven't been here that long," Penny grinned. "Boy, on Conrail, they wouldn't have a brakeman cleaning the snow off a parking lot, or making the boss's coffee."

"At Conrail, they wouldn't have you working, period," Bud replied. "That's why you're here."

Bud was in the process of taking his coat off when the phone rang. "That's probably Marshall already," he thought, and picked up the phone.

It proved to not be Marshall, but Les Marks, the division superintendent of the Decatur and Overland Railroad; all of the C&SL traffic that came to or went off the railroad -- and that was most of it -- came over the D&O, from the interchange yard down in Camden. Bud tried to stay friendly with Marks, even through the two were constantly blaming each other for traffic problems over the interchange. After exchanging unkind comments about the weather, Marks said, "Look, Bud, we've got a couple of problems. I've got an engine stranded down in your yard. Do you think you could stuff it into your engine shed for a couple days?

"Not if it's a big engine," Bud said, "The Chessie and the LN's 9608 already have it pretty full."

"Just an SW-9," Marks told him. "It's not that big."

"I don't see any problem, then" Bud said, "But why is it stranded?"

"Well, I was getting to that," Marks responded. "We've had a little problem with the drawbridge south of your place there."

Bud held his breath. This could be serious. Marks went on, "That thing's run by a big electric motor, and we've had trouble with it off and on. Well, yesterday we finally got a crew out to tear it down, and they thought they had it fixed so they tested it."

"Oh, shit," Bud said bleakly, searching for words.

"Well, at least they didn't drop the goddamn thing," Marks continued. "But they did manage to short something out, and they burned the commutator down to scrap metal. Totaled the son of a bitch, and now the bridge is stuck half open."

"How long?" was all Bud could ask.

"Turns out we luck out. I just got off the phone with General Electric. Had to hunt around a bit. They've got a motor in stock that's a perfect replacement for the one down there, except that this one is a new one, so that ought to fix the problem for good. They're gonna ship it out right away, so we ought to have it in four or five days and have the bridge back going about the end of next week."

Now that Bud know what the problem was, he could turn from defeat to anger. The drawbridge was the key to his business, and he didn't control it. If the D&O didn't get it fixed -- and soon -- the Camden and Spearfish Lake was out of business. "Yeah, a week or ten days, or two weeks," he exploded. "Do you know how much toilet paper Jerusalem Paper is going to have in their warehouse in ten days or two weeks? They're going to be screaming at me to get it out of there. They're going to be screaming for chemicals! If I tell them, 'Tough, the bridge is out, ' they're gonna say, 'Put it on a truck, ' and there goes my business."

"Bud, don't worry about it," Marks replied soothingly. "Remember, we have trackage to service up there, too, and we're just not going to let it sit. We haven't got anything scheduled upbound for you for three or four days, and this storm that's coming is gonna back everything up even further by another couple of days. You get a weekend in there, too. You have an extra all set up to go as soon as we get the bridge open, and we'll have everything that's accumulated for you ready to go."

This made a certain amount of sense, considering that it was what Bud would have to do, like it or not. All he could say was, "Well, all right. Just get the damn thing fixed. I'll try to cool Jerusalem Paper down for a few days, but keep me posted on what's happening with that damn bridge, will you?"

It was snowing just as hard in Warsaw, thirty miles or so to the east. Like Spearfish Lake, the town was pretty well closed down. The town's one snowplow had been out most of the night, trying to keep the streets more or less clear, especially on the north-south streets where the drifting was the worst. It had been a losing battle. The snow had drifted badly all night, and plowing through on each pass up Main Street had been like breaking trail. Sensible people didn't take cars out in weather like this, anyway, unless they had to, and usually they were sorry for it. Four wheel drive vehicles and snowmobiles still moved, and some degree of normality was still upon the little town. Northern towns are used to snow, and it takes something more than an overnight blizzard to shake off that normality.

Normality is usually pretty hard to shake in little towns like Warsaw, anyway. Most of the town's money came from jobs at the Jerusalem Paper plant, and outside of that there wasn't much but a fertilizer dealership for the few surrounding potato farmers, a couple of gas stations, three bars, a couple of small grocery stores, a school, an oil distributorship, a hardware and sporting goods store and a few other small businesses that are necessary to support a town of a few over nine hundred people that's isolated by nearly forty miles of road from the nearest town that approached its size.

Warsaw was neither a pretty nor a wealthy town. It was, in fact, rather shabby and beat-up, much like the old paper plant upon whose fortunes the town lived or died. It was pretty much a place where people live, and go to work, and come home again, and feel vaguely dissatisfied, but don't often think better of it.

Though Bud didn't know it, Jerusalem Paper Products wasn't in that big a hurry for the load of chemical piggybacks, for the paper mill had pretty much closed for the day on account of the snow. Even here, some activities went on with at least a degree of normality. A few supervisors and office people had snowmobiled or driven four-wheel drive vehicles to work, grateful for a peaceful day that allowed them to get something done without having the pressure of production surrounding them.

One of those people was the plant's maintenance supervisor, Clay Whitehall. The fork truck drivers had been complaining about one of the powered overhead doors in Shed 1, the northernmost paper warehouse, to the east of the plant near a pulp log stockyard. From their description, it sounded like one of the door's tracks was bent, but Whitehall couldn't imagine how it could have gotten bent unless one of the fork trucks had hit it with its lift all the way up.

For the last few days, Whitehall had been concerned with a balky motor in one of the wood chipping units. To a paper company, that was a hell of a lot more important than a garage door that had to be cycled each way a couple of times before it would open fully. Now, the chipper was fixed, and he could survey some of the other problems that had been piling up here and there around the sprawling, ramshackle old plant. While it was quiet, it was a good time to decide which one of the virtually continuous problems to point his repair crews at when the blizzard let up and they could come back to work.

Something of a warning bell went off in the maintenance supervisor's head as he reached for the side door of the fairly new steel warehouse. He didn't realize it until he thought about it much later: the door was warm -- no, downright hot, like it would get in summer, instead of being freezing cold in the kind of weather Warsaw was having.

For some reason, Whitehall ignored the quiet mental warning, and opening the door, he was nearly instantly flattened by a belch of heat and gray smoke pouring from the interior of the warehouse.

At about the time that Whitehall was picking himself up out of the snow and running as best as he could for the nearest phone, Bud listened to the coffeepot burp and wished that it was ready. His conversation with Les Marks had shaken him. He'd known all along that some little damn thing like this could come along and wreck what had become a nice little railroad. Was this the one?

Once upon a time, Bud Ellsberg had been a grocer. He had inherited the small-town grocery business, and had made it grow into a large, modern operation. He had hated all of it. He was well past thirty when he reluctantly conceded that he would probably be a grocer for the rest of his life, and spend the rest of his life hating it.

Then a vague interest had led to opportunity.

When he had been perhaps five years old, he'd waved to the engineer of a steam engine passing through California Cut out west of Spearfish Lake -- it had to have been one of the last steamers on the line -- and, in the way of a good many small boys, he'd decided right there and then that someday he wanted to be the engineer of a snorting, puffing, hissing steam engine hauling pulpwood down through the north woods he'd grown up in. Like almost all boyhood ambitions, it had gone away, but he had always had a more than normal interest in what happened out on the railroad tracks west of town. When an Alco or an FM would whistle for the state road crossing, he'd look up in the grocery store, listen to the sound, and couldn't help thinking that it had to be the way freight heading up to Warsaw with a load of dye, or a load of rock downbound for Camden.

One day, this small part of his life threatened to end, for the Decatur and Overland Railroad announced plans to abandon the line from Camden to Warsaw, and service Jerusalem Paper in Warsaw and Summit Limestone east of Walsenberg over the nearly-abandoned Kremmling branch. Bud had picked the right person to commiserate with at Rick's Cafe, down the street from the supermarket: a train buff by the name of Frank Matson, who was also the president of the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank.

The two train fans knew of several short-line railroads that had been formed by local people when a major railroad abandoned their town, and they knew there were a few lumber yards, logging companies and the like between Spearfish Lake and Camden that would miss rail service. Somehow, the idea was born to scratch together some capital and maybe make salaries by running the line. That afternoon, at the counter of Rick's Cafe, the Camden and Spearfish Lake had been born.

It was a talkative secretary in a D&O office that tipped them off that the railroad didn't plan to run traffic over the Kremmling branch any longer than they had to, and that brought them the backing of Summit Pit and Jerusalem paper. Even with that backing, the initial cost of the expanded line was more than the infant company could possibly have managed, but good political connections got them a state transportation department subsidy that was enough to make the purchase price and still have a little left over to upgrade really bad sections of track and buy some equipment.

The going was far from easy those first couple years, when there had been just the "Rock", as they called their first Geep, and the one crew to run it. It could take them a week to run from Spearfish Lake the 33 miles to Warsaw, switch the paper plant, the oil company and the fertilizer plan, then go on 21 miles to Summit Pit east of Walsenberg, then return to Spearfish Lake and go on to Camden, stopping and switching at the various little towns along the way. At Camden, they would switch various local plants and industrial branches, interchange the toilet paper and limestone with the D&O, picking up chemistry and empty gondolas, then return north to Spearfish Lake, again switching at Moffat, Meeker, Albany River and a few other sidings that only the railroad knew by name.

In those days, the C&SL train -- not even dignified by a number, since there was only one -- had trailed a way car, not for a conductor and rear brakeman, but for the two-man crew to sleep in and live out of when they went over the 12-hour serivce limit. In those days, the train left on Monday for Warsaw and Walsenberg, and could usually figure on Tuesday night back at Spearfish Lake. They would take off for Camden on Wednesday morning, and could then figure on getting back home sometime between Thursday night and Sunday morning.

Bud usually had been the brakeman on that crew. It had been the happiest time of his life, since he had sold the Spearfish Lake Super Market for stock in the struggling little railroad. The other crewman was a retired Norfolk and Western engineer, Adam Howland, who had moved to the north woods with the notion of getting to know by name all the trout in the little streams feeding the Spearfish River. He hadn't known what he was getting himself in for when he had agreed to work for the little railroad part-time to stave off boredom when the trout season was closed.

Bud couldn't remember a time in those early years when the hoglawed caboose wasn't sitting within a hundred yards of an interesting-looking trout stream.

On the long, slow trips, Bud learned about the operating side of railroading, and had become a fair engineer -- only fair, since he lacked Adam's lifetime of experience, and fortunately, those early days hadn't lasted. Some of the state money had gone to rebuild various sections of the track, and some deep breathing by the bank and some inspired bargain hunting had resulted in another old Electromotive engine, an old, but sound NW-2 switch engine that had toiled for the Milwaukee Road for a third of a century. Renumbered 202, the Milwaukee switched Summit Pit and Warsaw, and in its spare time hauled the section gang, track equipment and ballast cars up and down the line.

Bud had finally been able to initiate one-day round trip service from Spearfish Lake when they bought an old 44-ton General Electric switcher that had long been a yard goat for the Chesapeake and Ohio. Naturally called the Chessie, it handled all the switching and interchange in Camden, operated for maybe ten hours a week by a couple of retired D&O oldtimers, Ralph McPhee and Harold Stevens, a couple of engineers who had found retirement boring and were glad to have something to stave off the soap operas.

As business had increased, especially with the rock trains in the summer, more power had been needed, and Bud had added the Burlington and had hired another engineer, Walt Archer, a D&O hand who had gotten tired of commuting to Putnam Yard at Camden from his home on the Spearfish Lake subdivision. These days, usually either Adam or Walt handled the Geep set on the turnaround runs, and either Walt or Bud handled the switching with the Milwaukee. Bud did run the Geep lashup occasionally, so with Adam in Florida and Walt at the dentist, he wasn't a stranger to the main-line runs. Usually, the Geeps went to Warsaw and Walsenberg and back to Spearfish Lake one day, then Camden and back the next, skipping Saturday and Sunday and then picking up where they left off on Monday.

Even though Bud still enjoyed being a kid and playing with the biggest model railroad that a kid could have, he could sometimes be heard saying that it was getting to be too much like a regular business. Enthusiasm, economy and most of all, local ownership and backing had indeed made the Camden and Spearfish Lake a moderately successful business: it was in the black, and likely to stay that way unless something untoward happened. Being in the black was in itself something of an unusual adventure for a railroad, and Bud never wished for the untoward; he enjoyed playing with his trains too much.

"It's not all bad, Betty," he said, getting up and heading for the coffeepot. "We get a few days break. Once we get that load we got yesterday up to Warsaw, we can maybe get a couple days off. Then, I think we'll tear into the Burlington. I doubt if we'll ever be able to get it to run right, but maybe we can get it to run better."

Typical of short-line railroads, motive power on the Camden and Spearfish Lake had once belonged to someone else, but the relative quality of the two General Motors Electromotive Division GP-7s was more or less the reverse of what a typical railroader might expect.

When Bud went shopping for the road's first engine, he had a fair amount of money to spend, and the Rock Island had just gone belly-up once and for all, leaving a glut of cheap motive power on the market. The Rock Island had long been skimpy on maintenance, but the GP-7 that was to become C&SL 101 had just recently been overhauled and was in first-rate condition. This engine, the "Rock", had proved to be just that: the mainstay of Bud's operation.

As business had built up, Bud had come to realize that the one engine just wasn't enough; a second one was needed, one that could run as a multiple unit with control from one cab, and another GP-7 was a logical choice since it simplified stocking parts. Bud had put off the decision until the situation had become critical, and by that time money was tighter and good engines weren't as cheap. After several months, he had reluctantly purchased the second Geep from an Illinois scrap yard, for not much more than scrap prices.

The engine had a lot of miles on it on the Burlington Northern, which is not in the habit of skimping on maintenance, but the railroad's management knew they were going to scrap the engine, so they had run it into the ground without a nickel's worth of upkeep. Thus, the Burlington was something of a broken reed, kept running with chewing gum and bailing wire and far too much money, liable to blow something at any time.

Bud poured a cup of coffee and called Walt Archer. "Don't try to make it in just now," he told him. "I'll take John, and we'll hook the Geeps onto the plow and clear the line off to Warsaw. If we get up there all right, I'll have Betty give you a call, and you and Ed can take SLWR-12 up there. There's no real rush, though. We might put it off till tomorrow, since that'll be the last run for a while," he said, explaining about the bridge.