Chapter 15

1107 1/9 - 1353 1/9: Plow Extra One

"What the hell happened?" Fred Linder asked Kuralt after roaring over on his snowmobile. "We thought that this steel building could stand off sparks from the yard fire."

"It could," a glum Kuralt replied. "It did. But when we were loading the ammonium nitrate, we spilled it all over the place. I had the stuff that we spilled outside covered up with snow, I thought, but then I think a spark hit near the south door, and there was fire all over the place just like that! Everybody's OK, though."

"I hate to say this," Linder told Kuralt and Chip Halsey, who had joined them. "But yesterday, we pretty well agreed that if this place caught we were just going to have to let it burn. We've still got a slim chance to save something of the paper plant. This place is gone. About all we can do is try to keep it from getting too wild while we're protecting the downwind exposure."

All three of them knew that the next problem downwind was the Warsaw Oil Company. There was perhaps a two hundred yard safety margin, and with the wind shifting it might not be in the danger it would have been in a few hours before. Linder told the two that he'd send the Kremmling department over to set up protection as soon as they arrived. Until then, they'd have to hope for the best.

As the fire chief turned to go, Halsey asked him, "Fred, we've still got that main storage tank west of the fire, and it's filled with anhydrous ammonia. Do you think maybe we should valve it off?

Linder could have kicked himself. He had ridden past the huge white tank with ANHYDROUS AMMONIA lettered on it a dozen times or more, and hadn't given it a second thought. The ammonia wasn't flammable by itself, but, when freed, in sufficent quantities it was poison gas. If that tank got hot enough to burst, the explosion could throw a mixture of liquid and gaseous ammonia all over the west part of town. "How long will it take to get the tank empty?" he asked Halsey.

"Don't know for sure, since it's pretty cold," the plant manager replied. "About all we can do is open the valves, get the pump going, and let it boil off. Might take hours, and short of building a fire under the tank, there's no way to hurry the process."

"Let 'er rip," Linder replied. "Thank God there's not much downwind for miles, and I think the tank is far enough over that it won't bother the railroad much. I sure hope Ellsberg remembers to wear his gas mask the next time he comes up this way."

Amazingly enough, Plow Extra One seemed to be running reasonably well as it crossed the plains near Hoselton. The Burlington rumbled along, running about as well as it ever had. Bud was telling Sloat about the normal gauge readings when Walt broke into the radio circuit, calling from the Milwaukee. "Message to you from Linder, Bud. He says to make damn sure that everybody on board has got face masks or gas masks on. The fertilizer plant is going now, and they're venting ammonia from the big tank."

"Will do, Walt. I'm stopping right now. Did you get that other car of ammonium nitrate out of there?"

"Yeah," the Milwaukee's engineer replied. "But it didn't do a whole lot of good."

Once he had stopped, Bud carried the message back to the way car. It had turned out that the stop at Hoselton hadn't been necessary at all. The tiny town had stripped itself of people. Every Hoselton man, fireman or not, who could make the trip had ridden snowmobiles up the tracks to help out where they could.

It did make for a couple minutes to take a break. When Bud got back, Sloat was warming himself in the Burlington's cab. "How's it going up there?" Bud asked.

"Ain't no better," the mechanic replied. "The snow's just as bad as last time. The wind maybe shifted a bit, but the plowing's just as bad. How's this thing running?"

"Seems all right so far," Bud replied. "With this scrap heap, you never can tell for sure. I still wish we hadn't had to take her. If this thing craps out, they're stuck in Warsaw with all the engineers away from the Rock. Maybe Walt could tow us in up there, but there's no way he and the Milwaukee could get us back to Spearfish Lake."

"Yeah," Ed agreed. "We'd just have to wait for Ralph."

"If Ralph gets through," Bud corrected. "You told me yourself they were going to have a hell of a time getting past Thunder Lake. Last we'd heard, they'd gotten stuck and they were barely at Thunder Lake. Those guys have had enough time to get their gas masks on. Let's at least get there."

Sloat climbed back into the cupola of the plow. Bud sounded the whistle, and the Burlington began to move.

The last few miles into Warsaw went reasonably well, since the tracks were more or less into the wind and there hadn't been that much drifting since their passage a few hours before. As the train got closer to the town, it was obvious that there was trouble there. Now, the driving snow was filled with smoke, and there was something in the smoke that stung the eyes as it leaked around Bud's gas mask through his beard stubble. The Burlington didn't like the polluted air, either, for Bud sensed that it was running rough. Knowing where he was and the engine he was driving didn't help his tension and exhaustion one bit.

Finally, the short train passed out of the smoke from the burning fertilizer plant, and Bud thought that the engine seemed to be running a little better.

The wind had gotten around enough to make it somewhat uncomfortable near the unloading ramp, for the heat and the smoke from the burning plant were filling the air around the tracks. Fortunately, this time the train's consist was small, the handful of people on board made short work of unloading it.

Once the two flatcars were empty, Bud backed the GP-7 back out onto the main, and ran it up to the Plant Street crossing, where would be more protected, sitting nose to nose with the Milwaukee.

"We haven't got too long, Ed," Bud told his mechanic. "If you cann't figure out what's wrong with that thing and fix it in, say, an hour, then to hell with it. We're just going to have to go, anyway, and I want you with me. I'm going to try and get some sleep in the meantime."

Bud couldn't have had much sleep, for it seemed that he had barely laid down on the cab floor when Ed and Frank and Walt were climbing into the Burlington's cab. As he strove to wake up, Frank thrust a cup of coffee from the kitchen boxcar into his hand. The warmth and aroma of the coffee made him somewhat wakeful, if groggy. "Get it fixed?" he asked.

"Nope," Ed told him. "I'm afraid it's going to be a shop job, and maybe not even our shop. There's no way I can tear it apart here to find out what's wrong, and we may not even have what it takes in Spearfish Lake."

"Whatever it is," Walt added, "Seems to be located down beyond the bus bar. The rear truck is still all right."

"I think," Ed qualified.

"So, you're saying no change," Bud summed up. "No front truck, and the rear truck working until it goes bad, which could be now or never."

"That's about the size of it," Ed agreed. "Walt, you want to be real careful about shoving too much power to the rear truck, or you could burn out the traction motors or blow the bus, what with the front truck not drawing."

"Guess that means we'd better get a move on," Bud replied. "Wouldn't want to get caught up here."

Walt spoke up. "Before you go, Bud, I'd like to plow out to the east a ways, and leave the Milwaukee right in the middle of the scram train. With the wind shifting to the north, we might have to run east. There are more people in this town than there are gas masks."

"That means we're going to have to move the scram train down into the siding by the plant to get past it. That's not going to be too healthy."

"We can risk it for a few minutes," Matson said. "I already talked to Fred Linder about it. The scram train will just fit onto the siding if we run around it with the stuff you've already got. That way, we can do it in one move. We'll just have to tell the cooks to set out the coffee and stew for a few minutes."

The last statement mystified Bud, who had yet to see what Linder and Jim Horton and John Pacobel had done to his scram train. "You'll have to see the setup they've got here for yourself to believe it," Matson explained. "Twenty-four hour food service, although the food is as terrible as you'd expect from an army cook, and a rolling bunkhouse. All it lacks is hot and cold running water."

Bud had been sitting all this time. Now, he stood up and said, "Well, if we're going to do it, let's get it done. The track is crapping up behind us. Ed, you take the east end, Frank, the west. Frank, when we get to plowing, I want you to ride with me. I've got a couple things I need to talk to you about."

Running around the scram train only took a few minutes; it wasn't long before the two engines were heading further eastward. Bud needed what power the Milwaukee could add, for once they were half a mile or so past Warsaw the track hadn't been plowed all winter. Bud expected tough going.

It proved to be tough going, indeed. Once they got past the place that they had plowed out earlier to give the scram train a place to sit, they were immediately into the worst snowplowing that Bud had ever seen. They often had to plow this stretch out in the spring, after the snow had receded a bit, and it was hard going, then. But now, with winter at its worst, Plow Extra One only gained ground in short bursts, after backing off to make run after run with the big plow. After the first couple passes, Sloat called a halt; riding the plow was much too rough for safety. They would have to plow ahead blind.

"What was it you wanted to talk to me about?" Matson asked while Bud waited for Ed to join Walt in the Milwaukee.

"Did you hear about our buying the Kremmling branch from the D&O?"

"WHAT?"

"OK, you didn't hear about it." Bud went on to explain as he backed up.

"Well, if you had to do it, I guess you had to do it," Matson said as Bud called to Walt, to set the two engines charging into the snowbank again. The banker's voice rose as he tried to talk over the increasing noise from the Burlington. "It might prove to be an ace in the hole if they don't get that bridge fixed."

Bud didn't answer right away; they were too close to the place where they had stopped on the run before. The two engines gained another hundred yards or two, then bogged to a stop. "OK, Walt, I'll back us out again," he called into the radio, then turned his attention back to his banker friend. "That's only if we've got any traffic left. I told Penny the last time he came up here that if they lost the plant, then the railroad was pretty well up the creek."

"They've lost the plant. Linder isn't ready to admit it just yet, but they've lost. Marshall has given up. But we were going to lose it anyway, it turns out."

"How's that?" Bud asked as the engines continued to back.

"This is all a big secret, but Marshall let his hair down enough to me this morning to tell me that Jerusalem Paper was planning to close the plant."

Bud spoke into the radio again. "All right, Walt. Let's hit her again." Bud increased the Burlington's power and said, "Whatever the reason for it shutting down, it's a disaster to us. I've been thinking about it. Maybe we can keep going, but at a lower level. We've still got Summit Pit and the rock traffic, and the local stuff. We've got the track in fairly decent shape, now, so that wouldn't be a drag on us, even if we did have to get rid of a couple of engines."

As the speed rose, Matson replied, "Well, it's nothing we have to make our minds up about today. Maybe we can, and maybe we can't. Speaking for the bank, we'd have to examine things very carefully."

The big plow bit into the snowdrift once again. This time, the two engines managed to keep moving for nearly half a mile before they came to a big, deep cut just before the bank of the Spearfish River. Bud had been dreading this one.

Grant's Cut had been named after the Civil War general, back in the days when the D&O was still the D&C. Some stubborn, long-forgotten road foreman, clearing snow, had said, "I propose to fight it out along this line if it takes all winter," and the tag had stuck.

"I better have a look at this one before we try it," Bud said into the radio. "We're probably far enough." Bud and Frank climbed out of the idling Burlington's cab and climbed to the top of the plow. It didn't take much looking to see that the cause was hopeless; the plow was buried to the cupola line.

"That's a lot of snow," Frank said.

"Sure is," Bud agreed. "I just hope the D&O can get through it if they get up this far."

It took the two engines a lot of power and sand to even pull out of the mountain of snow, but once they were under way back to Warsaw, Bud resumed his conversation with Frank. "The only thing I can see is that there's still a lot of pulp wood up here. We might be able to generate about the carloadings downbound that we have now. That's the end of the upbound traffic to Warsaw, though."

"There's problems with that, too," Frank replied. "Most of the pulp would go down to the Jerusalem Paper plant in Rochester. That means down the new branch. That makes it good that you bought it, but it's going to cost a ton to fix it up. It'd be cheaper to go clear around through Camden, but that might run the cost up for Jerusalem Paper to the point where they'd ship the pulp by truck, contract or no contract, unless we cut our rates to the losing point. We're damned if we do and damned if we don't."