A Few More Train Stories

 

While thinking back to the first time these articles received ink in The Independent, I stopped to count on my fingers how many editors I’ve submitted them to. There have been four, maybe five, but for whatever the reason that they’ve moved on, all of them have been gracious in accepting my written offering.

     Sometimes, though, when sitting down to write, not much flows through my fingertips to the keyboard which can send me to the medicine chest to take a Tylenol. I have ongoing conversations with this little guy sitting on my shoulder who whispers, “Quit if you can’t do it anymore.”  Then, by chance, I might spot a word or phrase that makes me brush the little guy off and dig in again. So it was when I glanced at my recent book cover “Faint Echoes,” that sports a picture of an old time railroad engine.

     So many stories can be found about those old railroads, and I’ve got a collection of unused stories gleaned from old newspapers.  How about this one from 1883 when there was a traveling chapel on the Northern Pacific Railroad under the auspices of the Episcopalian Church. It held an altar and seats and would be sidetracked in some small town for a week or two. There it would remain for a weekend or more and services would be held for the people of the community who otherwise never had any sort of public worship. Mr. Fred Underwood recalls seeing this car in Sheldon twice in the summer of ’83.

     In 1885, a man who rode in a sealed box car loaded with salmon from Portland, Oregon was heard crying for water in the N.P. yards in Fargo. He was promptly arrested. Something about the lure of a locked car kept people interested. In 1901 a couple of hoboes broke into a refrigerator car at Enderlin and appropriated a head of cheese and some crackers.

     In 1909 the papers reported this about the state prohibition of alcohol and the unquenched thirsts. It could be said where there was a will, there was a way. Railroads surreptitiously shipped the desired goods in sugar barrels which held 72 bottles of beer. One Moorhead agent of a big brewing company claims to have shipped 133 rail cars filled with barrels of “sugar” into North Dakota since the first of the year and asserted the business was growing. 

     Hoboes who rode the trains when answering the call for labor in the harvest fields faced dangers. In 1915 we find the story out of Anselm on the Soo Line that reported a tough bunch of gun men were frequenting the harvest fields of the vicinity. They were waylaying laborers and robbing them of their earnings. When the train was well underway from the station, the gun men who at first blended in with the rest of the hoboes in the boxcar would flash a gun and begin their dirty work. They’d take whatever valuables they could find and then make them jump from the moving train.

     Near Fingal the same stunt was tried, and one of the robbed men suffered a broken arm plus other injuries after he jumped. He then managed to walk back to town from where he was taken to the hospital in Valley City for treatment. 

     News from McLeod reported transient laborers were moving west in great numbers and every train had a capacity load. Some were heading back east but the majority headed west. The writer stated there should be no shortage of men this fall judging from the large numbers coming into the state. We’re not told if these men had simply hopped on the train or were paying customers.

     In 1917 the passenger train on the N.P. ran into the freight train at Buttzville and completely demolished the the cow catcher on the engine and smashing up the caboose of the freight. The freight was running ten minutes ahead of the passenger and bucking the snow off the track. When it reached Buttzville the passenger train was so close that a flagman could not stop it. The day was blizzardy and when the engineer of the passenger train saw the danger ahead, he applied the brakes. The cars slid over a hundred feet on the frosty rails. The passengers were shaken up somewhat when the trains hit but were soon on their way again after the freight engine took them into Lisbon. Later the east bound freight towed the crippled engine into Fargo.     

     We have a copy of the Grant County history book that relates one of my favorite railroad stories that would never happen today. Quote, “The first Milwaukee train arrived in Shields in 1910. They had to stop to open and close gates where the railroad went through Charley McLaughlin’s pasture and the Parkin’s lease.” Imagine that scene! And that will be enough train stories for awhile.