Chapter 2

1007 1/8 - 1338 1/8: Plow Extra One

Don Kuralt and his bulldozer weren't coming too well with the burning hopper cars, Fred Linder soon found out. It was already hot around them, and the firefighters were at some risk to run up to the first hopper car for even seconds at a time, but relays of running figures had run a chain to a step on the first hopper to the back of the D-2. Whitehall, wearing a face mask, had just returned from an attempt at turning the hand wheel to release the brakes on the first car.

"The brakes are set on those cars," he reported. "It's too hot in there to get back to the other cars. I don't think I stand a chance of moving them, but we're getting about ready to try."

In a few more seconds, he was taking the slack out of the heavy chain. In his lowest gear, he poured the coal to the bulldozer's diesel, but the weight was too much and the bulldozer stalled.

With the engine started again, Linder took off his face mask for a moment and yelled, "Jerk 'em."

Kuralt nodded and backed the cat up twenty feet, then charged forward with everything he had. The chain's slack came out in a hurry; the chain went TWANG, then snapped. Kuralt dived to one side of the bulldozer as a broken end of it went past his ear like a shot. He stopped the cat's waddle, climbed off, and walked slowly over to Linder, his body shaking from the close call. "Jesus," he said.

"Yeah," the chief replied, shaken himself. "Well, that's out. What the hell do we do now? Stronger chain, maybe?

"No," Kuralt replied, still shaking. "The cat isn't going to be able to touch those things. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the railroad can shove a couple of empty cars in there, hook on, and maybe pull them out. Those big diesels and their electric motors can pull from a dead stop. Maybe they can get 'em out of there."

"It'll take hours for them to get one of those engines up here in this weather, and I don't think we've got hours."

Kuralt nodded and replied. "Don't think so, either. But, I can't think of anything else in town that has the slightest chance of getting those shitting things out of there."

The Camden and Spearfish Lake Railroad owned two rail snowplows. Bud Ellsberg guessed that there was an equipment number on them somewhere, but everyone just called them, "the little plow" and "the big plow".

The little plow was kept at Camden. It had been remodeled from an old gondola by the long-gone Minneapolis and St. Louis. The gon had been shortened, and a homemade blade made from flat steel plate and a couple of curved sections of old wrecked tank car had been added. The first winter they'd had the big plow, it had proven cumbersome for cleaning out all the little industrial sidings in Camden, so when Bud found the little plow awaiting the cutter's torch on the Chicago trip that had resulted in the Burlington, he had been quick to buy it on the spot.

The big plow was something else. Where the crew of the Chessie could see over the top of the blade of the little plow, the big plow stuck up in the air fully as high as the top of the Rock's cab. Another Rock Island veteran, it had been remodeled from the tender of some long-forgotten steam locomotive, and had been purchased at the same time that the Rock had been. It could be more than a bit difficult to use, since the plow blinded the engineer to anything that was happening in front of him. This deficency had been relieved -- but only somewhat relieved -- by the addition of a small, unheated cab above and behind the blade, in which a spotter could ride to look ahead. From this cab, there was a telephone connection to the engine, but the C&SL rarely hooked it up; engineer and spotter just used VHF radios to talk with one another.

Just as a shaken Kuralt climbed down from his bulldozer, John Penny was bouncing around inside the big plow's cab while Plow Extra One struggled up the tracks to Warsaw. The plow rocked and shuddered as it crashed through drift after drift. Each one seemed to explode on impact, blocking Penny's vision and pounding the heavy armored glass with chunks of hard-packed snow.

In the Rock's cab, the speedometer needle bounced wildly between 15 and 35 miles per hour; the constantly buzzing wheel-slip indicator almost drowned out the sound of the diesel. Bud knew from his gauges that the Rock was putting out about 75 percent power as they crashed up the track. All in all, he thought, Plow Extra One was doing well. Bud noted from the side of his cab that they were nearing the Hoselton crossing. The big plow, and lots of power, were doing their job; there hadn't been a cut yet where Bud had to back up for another run to crash through, though there had been a few close calls. They had just finished up one of those sticky cuts when Bud called to Penny on the VHF, "How you doing?"

"Oh, I'm doing OK," John replied. "I just wish I'd had an appointment to get my teeth fixed today."

"Young stud like you, I can believe it," Bud smirked. "Up here, when a logger says that, what he means is that he wants to get fixed up."

"I could stand for that," Penny agreed. "Who wouldn't take a soft, warm body over this hard, cold snow?"

Just then Betty's voice on the VHF caught Bud and John's attention over all the other noise in their cabs. "Jeez, I thought we were still in the hole," Bud thought, a little embarrassed at their subject matter.

The VHF radios scattered all around the C&SL were a valuable part of the whole operation, even though they had their limits. Tuned to the D&O yard frequency because of the Camden interchange, they were pretty much line of sight rigs, and in this hilly country, sometimes line of sight wasn't that far.

But VHF could be fluky. For instance, in the valley about a third of the way from Spearfish Lake to Warsaw, the train was radio-blind for several miles, but up on the flats near Hoselton, farther away and supposedly out of VHF range, communications were universally good -- but as the train neared Warsaw, only a little further away, they were again radio-blind from Spearfish Lake.

"I just got a call from the fire department in Warsaw," Betty's voice squawked over the speakers on the two radios. "They've got a fire up there and they want you to move some hopper cars. I told them you were already on your way up there. The fire chief is going to be calling you in a few minutes, as soon as he can get to the radio in the plant office."

"OK, Betty, thanks," Bud replied. "We'll get our butts up there. John, remember I told you we weren't gonna hurry?"

"Yeah?"

"I was wrong," Bud said, microphone in one hand, while reaching for the throttle with the other. "I'm gonna goose this rig. Hang on."

As Bud notched the throttle up, the roar of the two Geeps increased. To go much faster would take some inspired throttle jockeying, but the going was easy just then and the speedometer needle was hanging near 20 and meaning it when a strange voice came over the radio: Linder, calling from the C&SL VHF that Bud had put in the office at the paper plant. "Your office gal tells me you're on your way up here. How much longer are you gonna be?"

Bud thought for a moment. They were coming up on the Hoselton crossing, about ten miles from Warsaw. "If we can keep up the speed we're making now, about half an hour, but I can't guarantee I'm going to be able to hold that speed. There's a lot of snow out here, but I'm coming as hard as I can."

"Damn, that's better than I'd hoped," the fire chief replied. "Get here as quick as you can. Those fertilizer hoppers are puking toxic gas and shit all over the place, and we've got to get them out of here or we're going to have to evacuate the town. About the only place we've got to evacuate to is the school, and that's pretty close to the fire. Right now, it's crosswind from the hopper cars, and if the wind holds, it ought to be safe. Guess we'd better get started, anyway."

"We'll be there as soon as we can," Bud promised, understanding Linder's rambling perfectly. That man was worried.

Bud hung up the microphone and turned back to the job of running the engines with a renewed vengance. Inexplicably, the Geep lashup was running slower than it had been a few moments before.

Bud started looking at the gauges. The load meter was relatively low, in spite of the speed slowly sinking. According to the gauges, the Rock was putting out normally. Bud knew that it could have been the Burlington acting up, but there was no real way to tell from where he was, and he wasn't about to stop to go back and check the gauges on the green GP-7.

Picking up the microphone, he called Penny. "How's it going up there?"

"Oh, pretty good. We're going through some easy stuff."

They were definitely down on power. "Can you see anything wrong with 104?" Bud called.

It took a moment for the brakeman to reply. "Can't see a thing, but I can't see much from here, anyway. It's putting out about as much exhaust smoke as the Rock. Can't see anything loose or anything. We got trouble?"

"Yeah, something doesn't seem to be putting out like it should. It might just be my imagination, though." Bud knew that he was lying to himself. The speedometer was sinking.

The engines continued to press on while Bud thought. Evacuate the town? They had to be in real trouble in Warsaw. Without any good reason, except for a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he again reached for the radio and called his office.

Fortunately, he was still in the right area to reach Spearfish Lake. "Betty," he ordered, "Call Walt at home, and tell him to get his butt down to the office as quick as he can and get the Milwaukee warmed up."

"What do you want him to do with it?"

"Don't know yet," Bud admitted. "Something tells me we're going to need her. And I'll bet that if we need her, we're going to need her bad."

Not long later, a couple miles out from Warsaw, both Bud and John could smell the acridness of smoke on the wind. Buried in the faint smell of the smoke was an even fainter something else, and that something else wasn't pleasant at all.

Through the low visibility of the blowing snow, Bud could see familiar landmarks buried by drifts, and could tell that the County Road 232 crossing was near. He pulled on the whistle cord, but the Rock's horn only emitted a faint mewling. He pulled the cord again and again, for he knew that the horn must be filled with drifting snow, and eventually the Rock's familiar bellow defied the roar of the storm.

Down near the burning hopper cars, Fred Linder heard the faint sounds of the whistle. He turned to Marshall and said, "Well, they're finally here. I'm going to take my snowmobile and go catch them at the switch."

There were several switches involved in getting to the siding with the hopper cars, and Plow Extra One was at a dead stop while Bud waited for John to climb down from the cupola of the plow to dig out and throw the switch from the passing track to the industrial siding. The fire chief's snowmobile stopped next to the cab of the blue engine, and Linder climbed up the steps to where Bud waited.

"How's it going?" Bud asked.

"Bad," Linder replied. "All those goddamn hoppers are going now, and we're trying to evacuate the town, but it isn't going too good with all this snow. It could take us hours to get everybody over to the school. With all this wind, the farther from the fire the safer it is, but there's no roads open far enough out to be safe. We're having to take everyone to the school up Plant Street, right by the fire, but at least that's upwind of it."

Bud glanced out the window, just past the corner of the plow. John had been working on the switch, and at that moment his voice came over the VHF: "OK, I've got that one. I'll hike up to the next one; it's only fifty yards or so."

"OK," Bud replied into the radio, then turned back to the fire chief. "Just where the hell is this fire, anyway? Since you said hopper cars, I guessed you meant the fertilizer plant, but there doesn't seem to be anything burning over there."

"It's not the fertilizer plant," Linder replied, filling the engineer in on the location.

Bud reached for the VHF microphone again. "John, hold everything. We're not going up to Northern Fertilizer. We're going up the paper plant siding. Throw that switch back the other way." A few moments later, Penny was in the cab of the Rock as Bud eased the snowplow train forward through the switches.

Linder had Bud stop next to a fire engine near the main plant building. "Might as well have you guys see what the problem is," he said. The three climbed down from the idling engine and walked crosswind through the driving snow, around the corner of the plant to where they could see the hopper cars.

By now, it was hotter around the stricken cars. Flames were leaping up from the burning pulp logs behind them, and a thick cloud of evil-looking smoke belched from the hatches. The hatch covers were banging up and down as the hot gases inside tried to make their escape.

"My God, would you look at that," Penny said quietly.

"We don't dare get any closer than this without wearing face masks," Linder said, pointing to the bottle of compressed air that hung dangling over his shoulder. "And, it's hotter than a two dollar pistol in there. One of my guys thought you could move them by taking a couple of empty cars in front of you with the coupler open, so you wouldn't have to get too close."

Bud shook his head. "We don't have any empty cars with us. The only ones we could use for idler cars would be those full ones over at the fertilizer plant. If we got stuck in there and had to cut them off, you'd have an even worse problem than you've got now." The fireman nodded his head in agreement, and Bud went on, "There is a coupler on the front of the plow. The plow is only full of ballast, and the blade would make a pretty good shield."

"You think you can move them, then?"

"God, I don't know, Fred." Bud shook his head. "They probably set the brakes when they parked those things, but we can try. We can head in there with the plow coupler open and hook on. We couldn't hook up the air, but shit, the hoses are probably burnt away by now, anyway. We'll just have to try to drag the damn things out, brakes or no. I don't know if we've got enough power here to do it. Can you get us a couple of those air-pack things? And maybe fifty feet of rope, say, quarter inch?"

"Sure can," the fire chief agreed, and headed for the fire truck while Bud and John headed back toward the big plow, to clear the crusted snow off the coupler and make sure it was open and ready.

After a minute, Linder joined them, carrying a couple of the bulky face masks, and after he helped them finish with the coupler, he showed the railroaders how to buckle them on. "We'd better get our signals straight before we get going," Bud said. "John, you take that rope and tie it to the uncoupling lever behind the plow's blade. Run the rope back to the Rock's cab, and tie it to the handrail. Fred, you take John's radio, and go back about to where we looked at those cars, and tell me how close I'm getting to them, since with that big-assed plow I can't see a thing. I'm planning to go in there fast, but I don't want to hit them too hard. OK?"

The fireman nodded, and Bud went on. "When we get hooked up, I'll pop those cars once. If we get them moving, I'll try to keep them moving at least until the 232 crossing. How long is the air in these things good for?"

"About forty minutes," Linder said.

"All right, we'll stop there, and you can get us some fresh ones. We'll try to release the brakes, and if we can, we'll drag the damn things clear down to the Hoselton siding where they can burn in peace and all that toxic crap can only kill a few coyotes."

The fireman nodded. "Sounds good to me."

Bud went on. "OK, John, if I can't move those cars, I'll hit the whistle, and you yank that uncoupling rope for all you're worth. If you can't get the plow to uncouple from the hoppers, don't wait for me, just get down there and uncouple from the plow, and I'll back down as soon as you've got us loose. Got that?"

"Sure do," Penny replied. If you can't get them to move, get us the hell loose. Right."

"OK, Fred, can you have an engine wet down the tracks under the cars? I'm going to need all the help I can get, and maybe that'll help us skid them some."

"Can do."

"Just don't get anything under the engines," Bud cautioned.

A couple minutes later, the two railroad men were up in the Rock's cab, breathing bottled air. The VHF set crackled with Linder's voice. "We're ready when you are."

Bud looked at John. The brakeman nodded, and Bud reached for the throttle.

The Rock and the Burlington belched black smoke from their stacks as Bud fed a lot of power roughly to them. The engines bellowed, and Bud yanked on the whistle cord. Plow Extra One pushed quickly out past the downwind side of the main plant with the plow spraying snow to each side, swung around the curve of light rail, and pointed straight at the burning fertilizer hoppers.

The VHF came alive again with Linder's voice. "About a hundred yards to go... eighty... sixty." Bud backed off on the power; he was perhaps going a bit too hard. The VHF set continued to blare "Fifty... forty..."

Bud came back hard on the power and started dropping sand. "... thirty... twenty... ten..." Bud cut the throttle and reached for the air, but before he could do anything, the couplers of the snowplow and the hopper car met and closed with a hard bang, giving the engines a jolt that was harder than Bud would have hoped. Even with the speed they had been carrying, he didn't think that the hopper cars could have moved, but now that he was hooked on, he was going to give them a fair try.

Bud transitioned the engines back to reverse, and yanked hard on the throttle. The two Geeps bellowed. Bud's eye went to the load meter; the two engines were pulling hard, even through they weren't at full power -- the two diesels engines apparently didn't like the toxic fumes much better than unprotected men would. Bud could look out the side window and see they weren't moving. The slip alarm began to buzz.

"Well, that's all she wrote," he thought as he cut the power and transitioned back the other way, to see if the cars could be broken loose by pushing on them. Again, the throttle came out until the slip alarm buzzed. It was no good, no good at all. Bud reached for the whistle cord, and the Rock's air horn bellowed a sad message to Penny and the waiting firemen.

Bud transitioned backward again as John took a mighty heave on the rope. Once again, the throttle made the two engines bellow as they backed down, the now blackened and steaming plow following behind. In his haste, Bud took the curve too fast for comfort, and he had to hit the air heavily to come to rest in the place they had left only a couple of minutes before.

John hopped off into the snow, letting the wind tear the toxic stink from his clothes before he dared to take his face mask off; Bud stayed in the cab for a moment to make sure the two engines were running before he opened both doors and left the now-stinking cab.

Linder came running up. As soon as Bud could get his face mask off, he turned to the disappointed fireman. "Couldn't touch them, Fred. Not a chance. Not a damn chance."

"Yeah, I could see that when you hit them going in. You really belted them, and they didn't move an inch."

"As much power as I had, they should have moved. Maybe the heat's so bad in there that the wheels are welded to the track, or maybe the ties have burnt out and the rails have spread, so the wheels are sitting down in the mud. Sorry, Fred. I tried."

"Well, yeah, but nice try, anyway," Linder said in a disappointed tone, then added, "That was our last hope to hold off evacuating."

"Yeah, I'm afraid you're going to have a hell of a mess here before it's all over with." Bud shook his head and asked, "Anything else we can do to help?"

"Can't think of anything right now," Linder told him, "But don't get out of touch. We might need something quick, and you've got the only direct route up here right now. I just wish the departments from Walsenberg and Spearfish Lake could get here as quick as you did, but that bridge out south of town puts us in a hell of a bind."

Bud's mind couldn't help but flash on his own bridge problem for a moment while Penny asked, "How long do you think it'll take for them to get here?"

"Walsenberg ought to be here in two or three hours, what with the snow and all, but Spearfish Lake is coming up 919 with a county plow. There's no telling when the hell they'll get here. I wouldn't be surprised if it's after dark."

Bud knew that County Road 919 wasn't much of a road. It was something of a logging trail that wandered up hill and down dale hither and yon through the forested countryside. With the bridge out, the road from Walsenberg wasn't much better, but at least it was shorter. "I don't know where the hell any help is going to come from after that," Linder added. We're going to have to get along with just the two of them."

"I wish there was something I could do to help," Bud said, feeling useless. "I've got the railroad open to Spearfish Lake, and as long as I get right back down there, it'll stay open. I can only plow eastward since there's no way to turn the plow around here, but once I get back down there I can pretty well come back here when I please."

Linder shrugged, "Well, you can't load fire engines in boxcars."

The idea hit Bud like a blow to the head. "No," he agreed euphorically. There was something he could do to help! "But I can damn sure load them on flatcars," he explained. "I've got a shitload of piggyback flats down in Spearfish lake right now."

Linder just stared in amazement as he began to comprehend Bud's idea. "Yeah!" he said.

Bud went on, "The flats are loaded right now, but I can probably have them unloaded by the time I get back down there. If you had the Spearfish Lake department waiting for me and everything goes right, I can probably be back up here in not much over three hours. I've got flatcars enough that I could maybe even load on some county plows and any other heavy equipment in Spearfish Lake you think you can use."

It was a moment before Linder shook his head and told the two railroaders, "I never in my wildest dreams ever thought about that. I'll get right on the horn and call Spearfish Lake. What the hell are you standing around here for?"

Fred Rumsey was another worried man. He had been one of the firefighters that had held a 2 1/2 inch stream of water on the smoking hopper cars while Plow Extra One had tried to drag them from the inferno of heat and smoke. Being a firefighter, Fred was fully aware of the toxic gas danger, so, even though he was a Jerusalem Paper employee and had reason to be worried for his job, at that moment, he was more worried about his wife, Marie.

The couple was due to have their first baby any day now. They had somewhat unwillingly taken a risk with this storm. Fred had wanted Marie to go and stay at his cousin's home in Spearfish Lake, where she would be closer to the hospital, but the storm had come sooner and fiercer than expected. They were stuck in Warsaw.