The runaway train that didn’t
Snowplow duty on the electrifed Milwaukee was dangerous — but it could have been worse
In 1949, I was working out of the small town of Avery, Idaho, on the Milwaukee Road. The railroad crossed the Bitterroot Mountains on a 1.7% grade through St. Paul Pass. The grade began just east of the Avery depot.
Avery was a crew-change, engine-change, and a helper terminal. There, steam engines were taken off trains and replaced with electrics. In the winter, Avery was also the base for the rotary snowplows operating between there and St. Regis, Mont.
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. On the head end was GE-750, the first “Little Joe,” as these streamlined motors of 1950 were known. At this point it was still a demonstrator locomotive on loan from General Electric.
A conventional three-unit GE freight motor was running as a mid-train helper. 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.
The temperature was about zero or maybe 10 degrees below where our rotary and the Mallet were working. We were on the Montana side of the mountain,