Steak and eggs
I was working a westbound over the Scenic Subdivision as the conductor on a Wenatchee-to-Seattle drag freight. The East pool ran from our home terminal of Seattle (Balmer Yard) east of the Cascade Mountains to Wenatchee, our away-from-home terminal. This was in December of 1983. It was very cold that day. The caboose stove was barely putting out any heat. I told the rear brakeman to stay up on the head-end power, I would endure the cold caboose by myself.
Leaving Leavenworth, we developed power problems. My engineer had a student that day, so he was able to look at the power while the student ran. There was a house that we called the “Old Man’s” house; we would use our speed as the caboose passed it to get an idea how we would do on the 2.2% grade leaving Merritt. As I passed in the caboose, it was not looking good. If the engineer could keep the problem unit running, we would just make it over the top at the east end of the Cascade Tunnel.
As we departed Merritt, the problem unit decided it had enough and shut down. They had a real struggle on the head end that I could feel in the caboose. Near the west switch at Berne, we lost the air.
As my crew walked back in the fresh snow, we discovered we had broken the knuckle on the west end of a grain hopper, about 25 cars from the head end. After my crew got things back together, I wrapped myself around the caboose stove to stay warm. The wind had picked up to the point the caboose was wiggling back and forth.
We recovered the air and again started for the tunnel. We traveled 10 cars and lost the air again. So, my crew goes back again, and I hear this over the radio: “Mike, you’re not going to believe this, but we pulled the drawbar out of the same car.” All I could say was, “That was a pretty good knuckle you guys replaced it with.”
Now, this is where it gets interesting. The trainmaster in Wenatchee had one of the yard crews put an empty intermodal flatcar on the rear of the caboose. The car was on its way to the car shop at Interbay in Seattle. It was missing the east drawbar. I checked the special instructions for the proper procedures. We had a big chain in the caboose for such issues, so I did what is called a Figure 8 wrap on the drawbars between the rear of the caboose on front of the car. That way if the car separated from the caboose, it would separate the air joint — and not the car, thus rolling downhill uncontrolled — only going as far as the slack from the chain allowed (about a foot).
With the bad-order car on the head end sitting over the west switch at Berne, there was no way to fix things — at least not quickly. There we sat in all our glory on 2.2% mountain grade without a drawbar on either end of the train. I bet that was quite the conversation starter in the division offices in Seattle.
Luckily for us, the Merritt local was out working that night. This, of course, took a bit of time for people to produce a plan (the story moves faster than the actual event).
While the head crew of my train took the leading 25 cars over to Scenic and shoved them into the siding at the west switch — behind an eastbound that had been waiting for us — the Merritt local came up behind our train at Berne and took the chain between the caboose and bad-order car off, then dragged the car down to Merritt. I rode with the local to warm up after tying the brakes on the rear of our train; there was not much to do until the head end returned from Scenic. The local ran me back up to my caboose. It then ran up the siding to the west switch to drag the other bad-order car down the hill.
We did get the whole mess moving forward again. The dog-catch crew was waiting for us at East Scenic. After the new crew changed with the head end, they pulled me out of the tunnel and spotted the caboose so I could change out with the relieving conductor. The Everett trainmaster was also there to take me and the crew down to Skykomish for the ride waiting to take us home to Seattle.
The trainmaster asked me what the problem was and I just laughed. “Well, it’s kind of hard to pull a train without a drawbar on either end of the train,” I said.
He replied, “Steak and eggs on me.”
Like this column? Read the author’s recent “An engineer’s life: Them’s the brakes.”
Updated July 5, 2024 with the correct photo.
