80 CLASSIC TRAINS FALL 2019
The Way It Was
Careening down Berkshire Hill’s sin-
gle-track line at top speed just south of
Great Barrington, Mass., engineer Pete
McLachlan prepares his conductor and
passengers aboard his Budd RDC1 for an
imminent collision.
“It was pouring rain, pitch dark,” he
recalls nearly five decades after that night.
“All of a sudden, right in the middle of
the track, I see cows directly ahead. I
threw it in ‘emergency!’”
A far cry from that stormy night, it’s
bright and sunny on a recent day when
my long-time neighbor McLachlan and I
sit down to chat about this and happier
reminiscences from his joyful lifetime of
railroading and train-watching. From a
steam-addicted “loco-lad” to engine pre-
parer, fireman, and engineer, McLachlan’s
career spans more than half a century
with the New Haven, Penn Central, Con-
rail, and Housatonic railroads.
That dark, rainy night on the old New
Haven’s line north of Danbury, Conn.,
was not McLachlan’s first encounter with
errant, track-minded bovines. There was
another incident two years earlier.
“We were running a local freight with
a pair of Alco RS3s, long end forward.The trees were so thick it was a tunnel.
Then a cow comes flying out of the
woods. We hit it broadside and boy, we
really felt it!”
That hapless cow, of course, was instant
hamburger. The impact bent up the lead
RS3, even crumpling the heavy-gauge
steel handrails. The incident taught Mc-
Lachlan to expect the worst from half-ton
cows in his right of way. So, no wonder
that after yelling at his RDC passengers to
“hold on tight,” McLachlan did the same.
What happened next? “
“Nothing,” exhales McLachlan.
“After rushing back to tell everybody
in the RDC to get ready, we didn’t feel a
thing! Not a bump, not a mark. To this
day, it’s a mystery. Twenty-seven passen-
gers on their way up from New York City
to New England wondered what the heck
all the fuss was about. I felt like a com-
plete ass.”
Next morning, the “meat” hit the fan.
In the daylight the carcasses of four
bloodied cows lay in a ditch aside the
rails. In the pitch black, rainy night, nei-
ther McLachlan nor his conductor had
seen them. But the farmer wasted no
time making a claim with the railroad.Hoghead turns Cow Killer
A New Haven veteran recalls run-ins with farm animals and other adventures
Engineer Pete McLachlan is at the throttle of Penn Central RDC1 No. 42 at Canaan, Conn., on a
cow-free run north to Pittsfield, Mass., in 1970. Ed Blackman, Chuck Fulkerson collection