AN ACCUMULATION OF SMALL DISADVANTAGES. The Cascade Range proved to be a source of frustration to explorers, and later railroad surveyors, seeking a path to the northwest coast of the United States. The best the hypercautious George B. McClellan (yes, the same general who had Richmond in his grasp and let it get away) could come up with was the Snoqualmie Pass, later the route left to the Milwaukee Road. The otherwise superbly-located Great Northern Railway first built a challenging set of switchbacks over the range, later supplanted by the first Cascade Tunnel. That still proved to be a choke point, and despite the use of a primitive three-phase electrification, an operational hazard, particularly when late-winter ocean-augmented snows challenged the snow teams with drifted-in cuts and lots of buildup for snowslides. Add a bit of cost-cutting in the hiring of switchmen and laborers for the snow gangs and the stage is set for an appalling railway disaster. That's the material for The White Cascade, Book Review No. 11. Had the story been fiction, a reader would quickly give up on the concatenation of bad weather forecasts, prolonged snows, equipment breakdowns, and snow-slides onto just-cleared tracks blocking the plow trains (with coal and water for resupply on the wrong side of those slides) as lame attempts by the author to manufacture tension. But (and here a good railroading yarn has in common with a real sea story that "no s***, this really happened" quality) those forecast errors, breakdowns, and slides cumulate to strand two westbound first-class trains, the Spokane-Seattle overnight train and the Twin Cities-Seattle mail train, at the Cascade Tunnel and unable for six days to proceed west. The snow, rain, chinook winds, and other acts of nature combine to produce a snowpack that collapses during a thunderstorm in an avalanche that carries away much of the town of Wellington, Washington, as well as the two trains, both held on sidetracks. After the rescue comes the rebuilding, the investigations, the recriminations, and the construction of additional snowsheds that kept the railroad relatively safe until the second Cascade Tunnel opened in 1929. The remains of the old line are available to experienced hikers as the Iron Goat Trail, with the snowsheds and tunnels off limits.