74 CLASSIC TRAINS FALL 2019
Englewood and saved a day or more on
the equipment cycle.
While I enjoyed the regular hours,
weekends off, home cooking, and even
the daily commute on the Harlem Line, I
missed being out on the railroad, and
spent as much time there as I could. The
winter of 1966–67 hit Chicago hard, so
the railroad rounded up officers who had
experience there to help. I was one of
them, and spent a couple
of weeks in the Windy
City, mostly at the Ash-
land Avenue yard, which
was a Flexi-Van inter-
modal terminal as well as
an industry support yard.
I don’t remember a lot
about my time there, ex-
cept that the days were
long, cold, and wet — but
I do remember the train trip home.
I was to spend a day or so in Cleveland
with my fiancée Rita to make plans for
our wedding in April, so I left Chicago on
train 6, the Fifth Avenue-Cleveland Limit-
ed, at 10 a.m. on a Sunday, the morning
after we were released from snow duty.
Ordinarily I’d have opted to ride the head
end, but I was dead tired, so I went back
in the train to find a seat and snooze. The
problem with that was there had been an-
other storm restricting travel, so the train
was full. I ended up standing in a vesti-
bule. Somewhere in Indiana farm coun-
try we went into emergency. Right away I
knew we’d hit a car, but I wasn’t prepared
for what we found when I walked back
with the crew.
The car, occupied by a man and two
young girls, lay crumpled in the ditch.
We could see the girls’ faces, which
looked so peaceful that at first we
thought they had survived. When we
realized they hadn’t, we thought — or
hoped — that they’d been
asleep at the time of
impact. The car had been
on a farm road that
approached a private
crossing on a steep down-
grade with not much visi-
bility up or down the
track. Whether the driver
had tried to stop and
couldn’t, was distracted,
maybe heading home from church, I nev-
er knew. There probably aren’t many
operating officers — or engine crews —
without such a grade-crossing experience
in their careers. Mercifully, I didn’t have
many. This one stays with me to this day,
and weighed especially heavily on my
mind when my two daughters were
growing up.
Back in the coal and ore business, I
had a couple of inspection trips lined up,
one in the Pennsylvania coal country and
another over the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie.
The latter included some of the fastestrunning I’ve ever experienced in a hi-rail
vehicle, partly to stay out of the way of
train traffic and partly because, as I found
out later, our superintendent guide liked
to go fast! The other trip was more lei-
surely and included 15-plus hours riding
the daily Cherry Tree–Newberry Junc-
tion coal train, and later another hi-rail
trip over several branches around Clear-
field, Pa. I remember this one well, as
while we were in the car the discussion
turned to the numerous rattlesnakes in
that area. Shortly after that, we stopped at
one of the mines and had to walk along-
side a string of cars to get to the loadout.
As we did so, I accidentally nudged an
air-brake bleeder rod. The resulting “hiss”
sounded like a rattler, causing consterna-
tion to say the least, followed by dirty
looks from the rest of the men, one of
whom was my boss.
With the time before our wedding get-
ting short, Rita and I found a nice little
apartment on the Harlem Line in Harts-
dale, N.Y. But soon afterwards I started
hearing rumors that another move might
be in the works, either to Boston or New-
berry Junction, adjacent to Williamsport
in north-central Pennsylvania. Either was
OK with me, as I’d grown up around Bos-
ton and Rita was from Du Bois, Pa. I sus-
pect my time on the coal and ore job ar-
gued in favor of Pennsylvania, and that’s
how it turned out: I was to be trainmaster
at Newberry Junction. A week after ourA solitary hopper car awaits loading at a mine somewhere in the Clearfield/Cherry Tree coal country in fall 1966. There were many such
small-scale coal mines on the Central’s Pennsylvania lines in the pre-unit train era.
During a hi-rail
ride on what would
become my new
territory, discus-
sion turned to the
numerous rattle-
snakes in the area.