Winter on the Rails

You’ve heard it before: people keep the railroads running. But it’s still true. Each story presented here is a story about people. People battling the elements to move interstate commerce. People creating machines to make those battles easier. And even people photographing these battles for future generations to understand. So we present here some of the best stories of people and railroading in winter. Within their stories are a larger narrative of progress. From digging out by hand on the Milwaukee Road in the 1930s (page 6) to jet-powered snow blowers on Conrail (page 64), railroads have overcome winter with brute force and innovation. _ at innovation included two machines named for their inventors: the Jordan spreader (page 18) and the Leslie rotary snowplow (page 36). Noted photographers Frank Keller…

Railroads of the United States spend millions of dollars each year keeping their lines operating in even the fiercest winter weather, while their competitors on the highways wait for the government to clear the roads. In this article, Trains tells the story of railroad snow-fighting on one Midwestern railroad during the particularly bitter winter of 1935-36, and of how the railroad kept trains running when all other means of transportation were tied up. Battling blizzards, subzero temperatures, and high winds, hundreds of men fought nine years ago to keep open the hard-hit eastern end of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad (Milwaukee Road) in an epic war against nature. From Jan. 18 to Feb. 20, 1936, the railroad spent more than a million dollars for snow removal. Only…

The melodic notes of “White Christmas” blaring over the loudspeakers in the terminal concourse might cheer the homeward-bound commuters, but the lyrics aren’t exactly “Hit Parade” in the executive offices on the second floor. Ironically, the same white stuff that gives some railroads their revenue-earning ski trains also socks them in the pocketbook with staggering removal costs. Poets and songwriters to the contrary, the cottony flakes soon lose their beauty when they begin to leave footprints on the profit and loss statements and timetables of the nation’s carriers. The battle against snow begins long before winter’s leaden skies appear. It may still be shirt-sleeve weather when you first notice the freshly painted and overhauled snowplows standing on their strategic sidings. Soon after, as the leaves begin to turn color and…

Anyone who has been around railroading for some length of time has heard of the Jordan spreader. Railroad maintenance-of-way equipment is extraordinarily durable, especially the traditional wrecking cranes, snowplows, and spreaders, and therefore we tend to think of the manufacturers as long vanished, doomed by the everlasting nature of their initial production. Not so the O.F. Jordan Co. of East Chicago, Ind., which is very much alive, and in 1968 turned out five new Jordans and rebuilt and upgraded four older machines. That was a poor year as recent years have gone, but railroad buying was down in all areas. Still, the small two-track shop with its recent normal complement of about 30 men was kept reasonably busy, for usually only two machines can be handled at a time on…

I battled the worst snow and cold I had ever encountered in December 1976. With the help of a tireless Jordan spreader and a shortline general manager, I survived a bitter cold day on a Delaware & Hudson Railway job. I joined the D&H in April 1976 as an assistant trainmaster. And as J.R. (Dick) Williams, general superintendent of transportation, told me with a sly smile on my first day, “Just remember, there’s nothing lower than assistant trainmaster, except two of ’em.” After becoming a New Haven brakeman in summer 1969, soon after the railroad integrated into Penn Central, I hired on as an extra board agent-operator. Then I accepted an offer in operations planning in New York. On April 1, 1976, PC would become Conrail, and at age 25,…

Outside the temperature was 10 degrees below zero, and 40 mph winds whipped up the snow and buffeted our locomotives. Powdery white stuff driven by the blizzard sifted in around the window cracks. Conductor Ekberg on the hind end was bellowing over the radio, trying to raise the yard office at Willmar. We had stalled in a drift on the main line, and if we didn’t get moving soon we would be drifted in solid. Our hogger, Karl Schmidt, looked out again at the billowing snow, got up with a grunt, and slowly put on his parka. As a fledgling brakeman on the Great Northern’s Willmar Division, I was amazed at our situation. Turbocharged power and CTC were supposed to handle all but the worst a Minnesota winter had to…