Chapter 20

1747 1/9 - 2017 1/9: Plow Extra Two
Lordston Northern Extra 9608

Ralph McPhee was back at the controls of the old Baldwin as the combined Plow Extra Two/Extra 9608 headed north from Blair. The old 2-6-0's owner was firing. "Begins to look like we might make it," the old man commented.

"I wonder what's going on up there?" Lee said.

"One of the boys back in the way car has a portable radio," McPhee told him. "It seems the paper plant is all burnt out, and they're fighting a fire in the town itself. We ought to be able to make Spearfish Lake before too much longer. From what I gathered, they still need us."

"Hope we get there," Lee replied. "That D&O switcher could go at any time, and this engine could, too."

"I know," the old man said. "Like me, she's too old to trust out by herself."

"I think we're getting close enough that Ellsberg could come and get us if something went wrong."

"He maybe could, if he's still got an engine running up there, or if he's not too busy doing something else. Let's just hope everything stays together."

"I damn sure hope so," Lee said. "This old girl has been holding together well enough on summer excursion service, but with the beating we're giving her, I wouldn't want to trust her as far as I could throw a fit."

There were three rescue trains working on the relief of Warsaw, and by now, each of them had established a separate personality, different from the others.

Plow Extra One, for example, had been a continual game of cannibals and missionaries: needs to be met at both ends of the run at the same time, and not enough power or time or people to be at either end. For a day and a half they had rushed back and forth, hardly at one end of the run before they desperately needed to be heading back the other way.

SX-3217, the Decatur and Overland train on the eastern route, commanded by Steve Cziller, and supported by the Lordston Northern Alco, had been made up of furious dashes forward, fast but short, broken by long, depressing halts. Still, despite the longer distance to cover, they had been closer to Warsaw than Plow Extra Two was now.

Plow Extra Two had the most simple personality of them all: it had been a straight ahead slugging match virtually every inch of the way, a lightweight having to land heavy blow after heavy blow, with too little power to work with. The rushes forward that the tripleheader made gained not miles, but yards, and sometimes feet; then, they would back off and charge the snow again. It was hard on the men; it was nearly impossible for the equipment.

Fragile though the old Baldwin might be, it had been a mainstay of the operation. Plow Extra Two would not have gotten five miles north of Moffat without the solid old engine. The Camden and Spearfish Lake 44-ton switcher was a little thing, indeed; thankful though everyone was to have her, the contributions of power that it made were relatively slight. Up in front, the D&O SW-9 was really the key to the whole operation. It was the largest engine that the train had, in both weight and power, and now, as they battered their way north from Blair, it became clear even to Ralph McPhee in the Baldwin that the 1478 was no longer well.

It had become necessary to back off and charge at snowdrifts that the train would have crashed through without stopping a few hours before. McPhee and Ballard had agreed that they would push the 1478 until it dropped. They weren't that far from Spearfish Lake: less than twenty miles. That would be twenty miles of hard going, but once they reached Spearfish Lake, it might be possible for Ed Sloat to fix the switcher, if the C&SL had the spare parts.

After the Meeker to Blair run, the run north from Blair to Albany River was relatively easy, in spite of the intermittent power from the lead engine. McPhee had predicted a couple of bad cuts on this stretch, and Ballard was beginning to wonder where they might appear.

The first of the two wasn't as bad as McPhee had expected. They were able to drop the consist and batter their way through in several runs, the 1478 sounding sicker with each run. Finally, the snow eased, and they inched their way forward to the second one, not far away.

The second cut was another crosswind, narrow cut, much like the one they had been stalled in south of Meeker. This time, the track leading up to the cut had been covered in three feet or more of snow, and with the 1478 not adding much to the progress of the train, the speed they had was not the mad rush that had almost buried the three engines that morning. Now, as the snow got radically deeper, Plow Extra Two just sighed gently to a stop. "Let's back off and try again," Ballard called over the radio.

With the consist parked a quarter of a mile behind, the three engines backed off perhaps two hundred yards and charged with all the power they had left. Even with one of them sick, in that distance the three could work up a healthy rate of speed. The 1478 burped, the 303 roared, and the 9608 chuffed an immense cloud of black coal smoke, yet the headlong charge gained them only about thirty yards in the deepening snow.

"Poke æer again," McPhee ordered. The three engines backed off for yet another run, as they had done maybe a couple of hundred times before in the last day.

While they were backing, Ballard called over the radio, "Ralph, that stuff is getting deep. We almost buried the plow in it that time."

"Don't know what else we can do."

Again, the engines belched and burped and snorrted as they charged the drift. This time, they gained less; maybe twenty yards, with at least a couple hundred more to go."

"Back her down," McPhee ordered again.

This time the order was greeted as it had been several times before on this trip: by the panting of the 9608 as she spun her drivers, to the tune of blaring wheel slip alarms from the diesels. Each engineer idled his engine, and Ballard called on the radio, "They're going to love us back there. I just wish we'd brought the frontloader."

"Yep, it's shovel time again," McPhee agreed. "I reckon no problem getting loose back here. I'll go back and get æem."

After the storm was over, the passengers on Plow Extra Two would swear up and down that they had dug the train out for the entire distance. In fact, this was the first time that the snow shovels had been out of the boxcar in ten hours and something like twenty-five miles.

The digging may have been worse this time, since everybody had been traveling, however slowly, for most of a day, and they were getting rather tired of it. Still, Milt Johnson was able to rouse his conglomeration of snow shovelers without too much trouble.

"Let's try something," McPhee told the fireman. "It shouldn't be too much trouble to dig out the plow and the engine, but we're still going to have a hell of a time getting through here. Once you get the engines loose, send your people down the track and have them dig down in that drift a bit. Maybe if we can dig it down to the height of the plow, we can push through it without burying the plow again."

The 1478 and the plow didn't take long to dig out, as McPhee had predicted, but digging a trench perhaps ten feet wide, four feet deep and a couple of hundred yards long took some time. Lee busied himself for a while servicing the old steamer, for she required care and feeding whenever she was stopped. McPhee and Stevens pitched in, more to help kill the time than to do anything else. By now the old engine was carrying a heavy coating of ice and encrusted snow; all the engines were, but some how it seemed more cruel to the old showpiece.

Ballard and the on-duty D&O men retreated to the way car, where the coffee pot was simmering. Ballard brought the steamer crew a cup of coffee.

"You know," McPhee said, "It's too bad that steam was going out just when instant coffee was coming in."

"Why's that?" Ballard asked.

"Well, on a steam engine, you had all the hot water you needed. I knew a lot of people that used to perk coffee on steam engines, but it always seemed like too much trouble to me."

"Never thought of that," Ballard admitted. "But I always said that steam engines were coffee percolaters at best."

A day before the steam people would have bristled at that remark; now, they recognized the good nature that had developed behind it. "Kind of dull, just sitting around here," McPhee said. "What do you say we poke at that trench real gently, and see how they're coming with it?"

"Beats standing around," Ballard agreed. He went back to the way car to gather up his crew, who trudged forward to their engines.

"Hey!" Ballard's voice came over the radio a minute later. "The 1478 isn't running!"

"Guess we sit here a while more," McPhee said. "We'll be up in a minute."

Lee and the two old men went forward to survey the situation. Lee was by far the most experienced diesel mechanic of the group -- though his experience ran more to the L&N Alco -- and so no damage could be done now, he pulled the suspected injector down a bit.

It wasn't long before he had an answer: "It's shot internally. I can spin the drive shaft with my fingers and not get any resistance, so something must be sheared in there."

"Ralph, would you have any idea of what's-his-name up there in Spearfish Lake would have a 567-series injector pump in stock?" Ballard asked.

"No idea," McPhee replied. "'Twouldn't suprise me, since he's got 567 engines. But 'twouldn't suprise me if he didn't, since I get the idea he runs on D&O spares a lot. You wouldn't expect him to keep something in stock unless it busted a lot."

"Well, nothing to do here, anyway," Ballard said thoughtfully. "I suppose we could hit the coffee again while they're digging at that thing. Once they get it dug down some more, we can putter away at it with the power we've got left."

Several cups of coffee had been downed before McPhee ordered the plow train forward. They held the speed way down as they poked at the area where the passengers had been digging. They only gained a few yards with each run, what with the drag that the dead and drained 1478 put on them, but several runs put them past where the passengers had been digging and out to where the snow depth slackened off.

They went back and picked up the passenger consist again, and brought it up to where the snow-encrusted passengers waited, then plowed on north.

It was another five miles to Albany River, and without the help of the 1478, they were slow miles indeed. Really underpowered now, Plow Extra Two had no thought of plowing with the consist attached; they had to clear the track a ways ahead with the plow, go back to pull the cars ahead a mile or so, then start all over again.

The weight of the now-dead 1478 seemed to McPhee to be more of a hindrance than a help. "The next siding's at Albany River," McPhee radioed to Ballard, who was riding the 1478 as a spotter. "Let's leave that thing on it and go on without."

"Sounds good to me," the D&O man replied. "But only if they can't fix it at Spearfish Lake."

"Fix what at Spearfish Lake?" a strange feminine voice replied. "Is that you, Ralph?"

"It sure is," the old man replied. He hadn't thought they were in radio range of Spearfish Lake, but they must have been since that last cut. "That's Betty, right?"

"No," the woman said. "This is Kate Ellsberg. Where are you?"

"We're about four miles out of Albany River. The D&O switcher died back there a mile or so. Is Bud there?"

"No, he's up in Warsaw with the Milwaukee and the scram train. They've been gone three or four hours, now, and as far as we know, they're still in Warsaw. They were planning on staying for a while."

"Never mind," McPhee replied, his hopes for help from Plow Extra One washed away. "Is Ed Sloat there?"

"He's out in the shop."

"Can you ask him if he has a 567-series injector pump in stock?"

"I don't even need to ask him," she said. "He was just up here complaining that he'd need one to get the Burlington going again."

"They had it going again?"

"Yeah, this morning," Kate told him. "But then it died on the way back from Warsaw with an ambulance run. Bud is mad enough to scrap it. What's happening with you?"

"We're still going," McPhee said. "We're going to leave the 1478 at Albany River. It's been real slow going, and the passengers have had to get out and dig. What's happening in Warsaw?"

"The paper plant has burnt out, and they've got the fertilizer plant and some houses on fire. You're not going to be too late. They still need you."

"We was beginning to wonder," McPhee admitted.

"How long before you'll be here?" Kate wanted to know.

"Don't want to say for sure. Depends on how well we can plow with just the 9608 and the 303. Won't be real soon."

McPhee hung up the microphone. Now, that was something. It seemed as if they had been battling their way forward endlessly, never getting anywhere, not knowing what was going on, and not even knowing if they were really needed. Now, even though it would be hours yet before they could reach the tracks that Plow Extra One had been clearing, they were in touch at last. It was a shame that the Spearfish Lake engines and plow were out of reach, for McPhee would have at least suggested that they meet him at Albany River. But, they'd made do this far; they'd make do the rest of the way.