RAILROAD
                   by Eugene Hutchinson Mallory 2
        From a talk I had with mother's cousin John Ferris.


     John had been station agent for the Great Western Railroad
for many years. To many people he was the Great Western and I
think he felt he was. People in those times lived their work and
he was much distressed by loss of the train to the snow and his
part in it.

     I cannot be sure why I spent time with him in the old
railroad station office. I believe I was waiting for someone to
come in from the wreck site on the work train that shuttled back
and forth. It was a wreck as the train had rammed the snow so
hard that without the protection of a plow and the specially
reinforced and weighted first cars of a regular plow train. It
had derailed and torn up the track. The cars were upright and
not much out of line, but they could only be recovered by
digging away the snow, dragging them back to undamaged track,
where they could be coaxed back on the rails.

     The damaged track was then repaired and the operation
advanced, one car at a time. It was painfully slow in every
sense of the word as the weather ranged from uncomfortable to
impossible and repeated storms put the whole thing back to
square one.

     At nay rate I settled down behind the rusty cannon ball
stove in John's old dingy office to listen to John and the click
clack of the telegraph. John had rigged a Prince Albert tobacco
tin to amplify the sound and apparently could talk and monitor
the traffic on the wire and he said could identify each familiar
sender by his distinctive "hand" on the key.

     The scene was familiar, but strange. I seemed to have come
straight from my childhood, but there was nothing in between.
Cousin in John had aged so much so that I realized I might not
have recognized him, if I had met him in a strange place.

     The Ferris family had never been close. When the three old
Ferris' brothers had all started competing nurseries the family
had fragmented. The acrimonious separation of my Ferris
grandparents had aggravated the situation. My grandmother was
still Gramp's Mormon wife to the other Ferris's.

     That too was strange as her Mormon upbringing was never
spoken of. She seemed to have left it all behind in Salt Lake.

     As a child, when Father had received his feeder cattle and
shipped his fat cattle on the Great Western cousin John and his
railroad had been a familiar part of my life. Father had
traveled with his cattle on the caboose to see them sold in
Chicago. He had even taken my half brother, William with him.
That was a trip I shall always regret I could never have, but
Father was too old before I was old enough.

     Everyone had traveled on the train then. I was in and out
of railway stations for years.

     Now I sat talking with a stranger who was not a stranger
and wondering how it had all vanished away and never been missed
until now.

     I was surprised at how freely John talked of the loss of
the train. He was plainly both angry and hurt by his part in it.
The railroads especially the Great Western were quite secretive
about their misadventure and short comings, but he seemed
willing to tell the story to me.

     It all began the day before as he said "It was just one
damn thing after another since the storms came."

     When John went to work that morning the temperature was
near zero. The station was cold. The night man had been laid
off. There wouldn't have been anything for him to do. The line
was blocked with a huge dune of snow at the five mile cut, west
of town. By the time the stoves in the office and the old
general waiting room were hot.

     The ladies waiting room had been closed for years. Lady
passengers were even rarer than passenger trains there abouts.
Anyway the wire clacked out the news that a plow train was on
the way.

     During the night it had left Olwien the closest point,
about a hundred miles east of Hampton. Things were looking up
and they might get the railroad under way again.

     At least that is what John thought.

     He was soon brought down to earth. Not for nothing was the
Great Western described as two streaks of rust laid on rotten
wood.

     No sooner had the train tackled the wind and cold hardened
snow than the spikes pulled out of that rotten wood, the rails
spread out and the front trunk of the lead plow was down on the
ties.

     The plow crew were experts at this kind of trouble and soon
had the wheels up on rail again. The famous off again, on again,
gone again Finnigan must have made his name on the Great
Western.

     But time was passing and the decision was made to dynamite
the snow to ease the pressure on the track.

     Even with the blasting the plows charged again and again,
backed out if they could, when they couldn't, the shovelers
freed the struggling engines.

     The afternoon was well advanced when lead plow broke
through to wind swept track, but there had been a price. The
water in the tenders of both engines was depleted.

     I knew that it was very bad news when the water is gone the
fire must be dumped and the engine is just a pile of dead iron.
I gave a questioning look across the tracks to the old elevated
tank and spout. The windmill with its big wheel and squat tower
gave the scene a quaint and antique, even a foreign look.

     John gave a snort and a sour laugh. "The well is dry, the
wind mill is broke. That relic has been on the bad order books
for five years."

     The plow train had to go for water. The choice was hard.
They could go ahead and gamble that the water would last until
they got to Clarion. The result would depend on how much snow
they would have to fight. Bucking snow was hard on water.

     The alternative was to back up to Waverly. That was
farther, but the track was clear. It could be done, but either
way meant leaving their work unfinished. The lead plow had only
cleared a ragged narrow slot. The second plow had so far only
deflected the snow that cascaded over the first one. The second
plow also carried hydraulically controlled wings that could
reach out and widen the cut and knock down the high snow
catching banks. That was still to be done and would require many
passes through the cut. No time for that.

     The brave bold men in the steam heated offices at division
said go on. John protested. It was risky and the weather was
uncertain.

     He was told that he was a timid old man and the track had
to be opened.

     So the timid old man watched the snow fighters depart on
their gamble to reach the water at Clarion, their work half
done. He locked the station door and trudged up tracks to the
east to his house on Bridge Street. As John told me later he
could feel the faint breath of the east wind, the snow wind. All
the way home under clouds gathering in the darkening sky John
felt that a terrible error had been made.

     In the night he dreamed that the snow train had run dry and
was somewhere out there helpless and freezing.

     When John awoke the liquid pearly snow light had already
permeated the silently cooling house and he knew before he left
his bed that a great snowfall had come. The east wind in his
face on his way home had not lied.

     The premonition of doom and catastrophic error had passed.
The snow train and all its trouble were just another train that
had come and gone, one of so many.

     The snow was heavy, gritty and impeding his feet as he made
his walk back to the station. There must have been at least a
foot of it, but his feet did not sink in deeply and the snow
slid sullenly back into the holes his feet had made. In the
muffled padded silence of the new snow, the pearly light that
had no source and cast no shadows and the continuous heavy veil
of new snow before his face, left John feeling strangely
isolated and at peace. This new fallen world was no more and no
less real than the fading dream of the plow train cold and
silent out of water. This too would pass.

     As on his trip home last night he walked into the wind.
Occasionally the fitful wind would gather a wisp of snow and
fling it harsh and burning against his face. This was no snow to
amuse children. Armed with the deepening cold and raised by the
wind from its torpor on the ground no living creature could face
it and stand or see or breathe. Even the great white bears of
Hudson's Bay turn tail and hunker down to blizzards kinder than
this one would be.

     John trudged on conscious of the effort to lift his feet
above the clogging snow and with the words, words old fashioned
even then "a gathering storm" in his mind.

     This was not a storm from elsewhere brought in on a vagrant
wind. This one was assembling itself here to rise and assert its
ancient sovereignty over this land of winter.

     Once inside the station John felt no urgency about the fate
of the plow train in its race for water. The wire traffic soon
told him that the race was won and the snow fighters were far up
the line. So John once his chores were out of the way settled at
his desk. The desk was in a sort of bay window extended from the
side of the station next to the mainline track. One pane of
glass faced the track and on each side a pane angled to give a
view up or down the line.

     It was hypnotic to watch the rising wind harrying the snow
from between the rails and rearranging it into exquisitely
carved and angled waves. So John sat waiting quietly for what he
did not know.

     The first of the great gusts came down the track and
slammed into the station.

     The change was sudden and terrifying. There was a great
thump and creak of timbers. John's three panes turned opaque
white as if immersed in milk. The already dim station darkened
instantly. John had ducked instinctively. He looked up to see if
the station was still with him. It was. His conical green desk
lamp still hung above his head on the end of the long black cord
that disappeared into the rafters above.

     As he stared upward snow dust wind driven between the
shingles drifted down and melted on his face and the lamp swung
in gentle circles in the disturbed air of the room.

     John said he was just plain scared and felt very small
indeed. "How many blows like that could even the sturdy old
station withstand?" But stand it did, the wind steadied at a
higher pitch, to be sure, and the snow scene outside reappeared
in John's windows.

     Before he had accepted the growing storm John got another
jolt. The wire brought the word the hog train was coming. As
John told it the bastards had to have known yesterday. That was
why the plow train had to go ahead, water or no water. Division
had kept its mouth shut because it wanted no advice. John had
argued against sending the plow train on, but division had won
that gamble and now they would never listen to him.

     With this new storm the hog train would never make it
through the cut, but that was not the worst of it. A train stuck
in a snow bank was nothing new, but a train crew trapped in a
killer storm like this, might as well be at the north pole.
Nothing could be done for them. He had to ask that the train be
held at Waverly, the last place with coal and water and yards
for the stock.

     John knew he could not prevail and he would get a terrible
bawling out, hard to take at his age from a younger man, but
John reached out a reluctant hand to the key and took his stand.

     The train must not come.

     It was worse than even he had expected. The train would go!
He was absolutely forbidden to interfere and was given to
understand how little weight he carried on this railroad or any
other. Wait on the passengers, if any, and stamp freight bills
that was all he was good for and with business the way it was
there was damn little reason to keep him on. John chewed this
bitter cud for a little while, listened to the storm and watched
the new snowbanks march across the tracks. Then he walked over
to the rack of tall levers and set the semaphore against the
train. He would try. He could do no more and no less.

     John waited in the beleaguered station there was nothing
else to do. All the small stations between Hampton and Waverly
were closed there would be no news until the train poked its
nose through the shifting curtain of snow. If it ever did. John
told me this was the first time he ever waited for a train and
hoped it didn't come.

     It did come just as John began to think that it might not.
He caught a flicker of yellow light among the lashing curtains
of snow. The lights were not for the train crew to see by, but
that they might be seen.

     The train came early in the afternoon before John had
touched the lunch that his wife Jesse had packed for him.

     John scrambled into his Hudson Bay Mackinaw fur cap and
mitts. He had kept on his thick wool sweater and his sheepskin
vest. The wind that ruled the outside world extended its domain
into the station. The snow that constantly infiltrated could
only be held at bay three or four feet from the red hot belly of
the traditional cannon ball stove. The station was not a cozy
place.

     John was ready in the doorway when the locomotive slipping
and sticking on the snowy rails came to a half opposite the
doorway.

     John held the station door shut against the wind and the
snow chunks flying about as the engine crunched through the
minor drifts that had built up in front of the station. When the
bombardment had stopped, he peeked out and saw the canvas
curtain that closed the opening between the engine and the
tender had been loosened, but no one seemed ready to come to
him. He must go to them. It was a bad sign. They had been warned
against him and promised a clear track.

     If a railroad man was on his way to hell, and these might
well be, he would resent the man who set a signal against him.

     It was only 10 feet across to the engine. Taking advantage
of a flaw in the raging wind John made it across locked onto a
grab iron and pulled himself behind the lashing curtain. He was
on a recessed step about a foot below the working deck in the
cab.

     Three men were standing on the floor plates, but no one
offered to step aside or give him a hand up.

     They all wanted to know why the signal was set against
them.

    "To keep you from going out there getting stuck, losing the
    train, and maybe freezing to death, that's why."

    "That track was plowed yesterday and you know it. We got to go.
    We can make it."


Johns answer was quick.

    "Yesterday maybe, but not today."


The answer came as a chorus.

    "Why not?"


     The storm answered for John as a tremendous gust of wind
set the engine trembling on its massive springs and penetrated
the closed curtain on the other side raising an evil cloud and
snow dust and coal dust in the cab.

     The blizzards argument was unanswerable and the conductor
under all sorts of dire threats if those hogs did not make
tomorrow's market if they didn't try. Reason had departed this
argument.

    "Get off my train old man unless you want to go to Souix City
    with us."


     John said, "I'll get off, but you'll never get to Souix
City. When you get into trouble, stick to the train, if you try
to walk out you won't last twenty minutes. Those hogs can wait
another day to die. Can't you?"

     The reply was "Off."

     John was not back in the station before there was a
tremendous staccato blast from the engine as it spun its drivers
to the back the slack into the couplers so the already freezing
cars could be started one at a time.

     John was at the window before the wheels spun again, fire
flying into the snow filled air. The spin was controlled and the
train began to move with a diminishing series of bangs and the
slack came out.

     The storm took up the challenge with a series of super
gusts.

     The churning wheels raised a curtain of turbulent snow and
by the time the caboose reached the windows the cars were
invisible and John only knew when the caboose went by when a
pink tint from the tail lights suffused the whirling curtain of
airborne snow.

     John, sagging with an immense weariness wrote in his log,
"hog train departed against signal 2.58 P.M. Temperature minus
21 degrees, wind 70 miles gusting to 100 (estimated)".
Visibility zero.