TODAY'S RAILROAD READING.

What happens when a snowstorm disrupts operations on an electrified mountain railroad?

Our work outfit had a 2-6-6-2 Mallet and we were called to push a steam rotary over the pass. A snow slide at Falcon had blocked the tracks and tore down the overhead trolley wires. Our rotary crew had cleared the passing track at Falcon, then we went to work on our other assignments for the day.

When we got to East Portal, we plowed out the sidings and had a meet with a westbound freight train.

That's got the tension necessary to a work of railroad fiction. Now bring in the human interactions.

Good railroad fiction has in common with good sea stories the opening line, "No s***, this really happened." The stories in the anthologies I've read tend to fall into a few broad categories: the rigid manager who has a humbling experience, the dispatcher or telegrapher that keeps 'em rolling despite natural or man-made problems, the maintainer that comes up with an inventive if not quite by the book fix.

Only we are in a no s*** this really happened situation.

Since the wire at Falcon was now buried in a pile of snow, the train would have to go through there with the pantographs down. With the trolley overhead gone, there were no working air compressors on the train as there was no source of electricity to run them.

This meant there would be no regenerative braking and the crew would have to handle train braking using only the compressed air in the system. Additionally, there was no way to release the train brakes once they were set.

As the train rolled through the gap in the trolley overhead, the brakes crept on more and more, threatening to stop the moving train. With no compressors the crew had no way to kick off the air brakes to keep the train moving through the gap. Eventually the train stalled with both electric engines sitting in the section that had no electricity.

That's a safety feature. You wouldn't want leakage in the brake line, thanks to entropy and amplified by cold weather, to have the brakes releasing.  But you have to put enough pressure back into the brake line to be able to reapply the brakes, once you have a pusher on and the train ready to move.

The air in the braking system on the freight had leaked off after two to three hours on a cold night in the mountains. We backed onto the it and coupled up the air from our 2-6-6-2. Then the old-time hoghead on the Mallet released the brakes and started pumping air into the train, but the air from the steam engine was too little and too late.

As soon as the brakes released, away went the train, and us with it.

I was in the rotary and the air gauge said 15 pounds in the train line. I knew that once the train started moving, we wouldn’t have enough brakes to stop it.

Will this story end with a broken train and dead and injured people? Will the substation flash over when the electric locomotives go into regeneration from too high a speed?  Will the steam locomotive engineer come to blows with the engineer on the helper electric locomotive?  Click over for the rest of the story.