On This Date: Runaway Coal Train Pushed By Wind For Nearly 100 MIles

Wind damage is no stranger to the
northeastern Colorado plains. 
Photo: Sherrif Nestor, Lincoln
 County Sheriffs Office

This weekend marks a mostly forgotten, strange-but-true event that I find pretty remarkable. Fully 132 years ago, residents out on the eastern plains of Colorado and southwest Nebraska were experiencing a wind storm of such severity that, though it had no vortex or definable center, it did damage worthy of a tornado. It tore the roof off of Akron's roundhouse of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad. However, what was truly remarkable were the events of a couple hours on a Wednesday afternoon, March 23rd, 1884.

What follows is verbatim from Trains & Travel's August 1953 issue from a 1934 Railway Age article retelling of what the Lincoln, Nebraska State Journal reported (reprinted by the 1884 Railroad Gazette).

"It will be remembered that on Thursday^⚒ March 26, there was a wind which amounted almost to a tornado. At Akron, it unroofed the roundhouse and did other damage. About 5 o'clock that evening, the wind, at its strongest, started a train of eight box cars loaded with coal that was standing on the side track. This eight-car train ran through the split switch and on eastward over the main track. The track was nearly level, but some distance this side it is downgrade, and the wind was so strong that it moved the cars more rapidly than passenger-train speed.

"The operator at Akron noticed the runaway train as it broke loose and sent the alarm down the line. Everything was sidetracked and the crazy train had the right of way. The Cannon Ball train westward was sidetracked just in time. Marvelous as it may seem, those runaway cars ran 100 miles, passing eight stations, over a track which is for a great part of the distance almost perfectly level, with no propelling power but the wind and their own inertia. They ran the hundred miles in less than three hours, station agents and others holding their breath with awe as the cars whirled by at high speed. They passed Haiger [69 miles from Akron] at about 40 miles an hour and on the downgrade east of Akron are estimated to have run 20 miles in 18 minutes. At Benkelman, 95 miles from Akron, a freight engine was run out following the runaway train, and after a chase of a few miles, closed the gap between itself and the freight cars, and was coupled^⚔ to them." 

Notes
⚒ - The difference in days of the week, specifically Wednesday vs. Thursday, is likely because of an error of someone along the line counting the days from 1884 to 1953 to calculate the day of the week, quite possibly forgetting that 1900 was not a leap year. If it did occur on March 26, 1884, it was a Wednesday.

⚔ - Because it was prior to the Railroad Safety Appliance Act, passed in 1894 and effective 1900, it's not readily known if the rolling stock on the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad, which was the subsidiary of the CB&Q for the railroad in Colorado and Nebraska, were equipped with Janney automatic couplers, the rough predecessor to the standard coupler used today. If not, although a link-and-pin coupling might be difficult, mating a connection would still be possible, especially if it happened at a slower speed like 10 miles per hour.

Map of the Route

The idea of a runaway train, even 132 years ago, being pushed 100 miles by the wind might sound like a bunch of hokum at first, but a railcar with steel wheels on steel rails has a lot less rolling resistance than one might encounter with say a trailer or a wagon. Despite the characterization of the line as flat and relatively straight, the entire distance is mostly downgrade, losing 2,137 feet in altitude over 93.6 miles, yielding an average of -0.43% grade. I'm not sure if that's enough to keep a car rolling on it's own, but if straight-line winds of 60 or 80 MPH pushed on something broad and tall enough, it's more than likely to move along at quite a clip. Covering 20 miles in 18 minutes, 8 boxcars loaded with coal would be moving faster than 60 MPH! Imagine watching that roll through Yuma!

Is it possible it could happen again? Yes. Is it probable? I believe if given the right conditions, it would be probable, but not as likely today because of the difference in size and use of high side gondolas, along with higher emphasis on securing loads for safety.◊

POTD - Right At Home In the Tunnel District

Would you believe it's been 10 years since Colorado Railroads - www.corailroads.com - began? I wouldn't have realized it but for the fact that the Rio Grande Heritage Unit produced commissioned by Union Pacific is 10 years old next month. What a great job they did on that design! Having met the designers at the unveiling, I was pleased to tell them that they really did a great job capturing the feel of a very diverse railroad with a solid and, I believe, unifying design that, as far as I'm concerned, would look great in a production run! It's the least Union Pacific could do, considering how seldom the locomotive seems to make it through Colorado.

Photo of the Day: Mike Danneman

Mike Danneman captured the vagabond UP 1989 when the notch-nosed, brawny SD-70ACe was leading a comparatively grimey sister ACe. Mr. Danneman said the UP Heritage Unit "looks right at home exiting Tunnel 29 east of Pinecliffe, Colorado," heading east over former D&RGW territory in the Moffat Road's Tunnel District on July 10, 2006.◊

POTD: Climbing the Divide At Dawn

Photo of the Day: Kevin Morgan

Good morning! That's what you can say about today's Photo of the Day, Kevin Morgan's dawn photograph of Union Pacific's daily manifest train from Denver's North Yard to Roper, Utah. Climbing out of Denver's suburbs toward the Big Ten curves, the Flatirons and eventually the Continental Divide summit inside the Moffat Tunnel, the train has about an hour lead on Amtrak's California Zephyr, which is yet to load in Denver. This shot is the second of two that morning. Kevin's work is consistently such a high quality, he could easily fill a yearly calendar! ◊

Perlman: A Glimpse of Pre-Staggers Act Railroading In America

This late 1950s-era documentary of the New York Central shows some very interesting technology of the time. Of particular interest is the analog version of a mass spectrometer used to predict the failure of a specific part inside a locomotive before it fails. Even in the era of DDE and JFK, railroads were pro-active!



This film was made by Alfred Perlman, president of the New York Central, back in the nadir of railroad regulation. Before the Staggers Act in 1980, railroads were suffering a slow, python-like squeezed death of government-supported competition of trucking industry and airlines on one side and government regulation via the ICC. The crush of it was that the ICC told them what they could charge with rate regulation, what contracts they could write, and all the bureaucracy such government control entailed.

Further, most of what he said was essentially correct. Such regulation was born in a monopoly and made sense at the time, but by the time of trucking and airlines, such regulations were impossible to live with. What he said would come back to haunt the US economy 20 years later. His company, the New York Central Railroad, after merging with the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1968 to try to survive, eventually failed outright, forcing the Gov't to come in and form Conrail, (a CONgress consolidated RAILroad essentially). In true "closing the barn door after the horse has bolted" fashion, Congress would come to the rescue with 4R and Staggers, both passed in major election years. He was telling the truth as he saw it to the American public, and he had hoped it would make a difference in getting some regulation lifted. Not enough, apparently.

Such a debacle likely prompted Reagan to comment a few years later,

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

In 1997, the merger of the Penn Central was essentially undone with CSX and Norfolk Southern, the two eastern US railroads, carving up Conrail between them.

[Off topic: Along with the Reagan quote, my conservative roots can't help but wonder if there's a lesson in this post somewhere for proponents of Obamacare.]◊

Last Surviving Wig Wag in Colorado Still Wags For Amtrak Twice a Day

As a young kid fascinated with trains, I would get my folks to take me often enough to the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden. Usually, it was my dad, but it could just as easily have been my mom and her mom as well out to stretch their legs and wander the small network of trails. Usually there was nothing running, not even the Gooses (sic) back then. But one time I remember stopping to view the strangest contraption I'd seen there or any on other right of way to my memory. When I got the courage to ask a volunteer, they said it was their wig wag signal. "Wig... wag? What's a wig wag?"

Long before the crossbucks and alternating red lights had become standard at railroad grade crossings, there were different means of attracting motorists' attention to the very real but too often unseen danger of a train approaching. A sensible solution by Albert Hunt, a Pacific Electric technician, decided that mimicking a crossing guards' lower half wave with a red lantern, then the railroad's universal indication to stop, would be the simplest and mechanically easier than a lot of other options. The gantry mounted wig wags were supplemented by other mounts, usually a pedestal in the median or off to the right of the lane approaching the crossing. The pedestal mounted a counter-weighted target with the box upside down, causing the target to wag like a person waving for attention.



The signals were deemed obsolete in 1949 when the now-common alternating red lights and crossbucks was standardized. Nevertheless, the ones in place since then have been wagging like the family dog for every train that crosses their stretch of rail.



While there doesn't appear to be a conspiracy afoot to remove these arcane contraptions, the number of active signals is dropping fast. The relative quiet of the original Atcheson Topeka & Santa Fe Railway route through Colorado's southeast and over Raton Pass allowed semaphore line signals to remain in place for years. That same quiet allowed the wig wags to survive as well, until the last decade. Wig wags at Manzanola and Rocky Ford have been retired, leaving a lone survivor in Delhi. A thoughtful aficionado with the know-how and resources has even placed a sign with it's unique status as "COLORADO'S LAST WIG WAG." Each day, Amtrak's Southwest Chief hustles by at track speed, one train in each direction, and precious little else. The rest of the day is reserved for quiet observation with cars and coyotes, along with the occasional antelope.

Surviving Wig Wags

The following map details a number of surviving wig-wags across the nation, mostly from Dan's Wig Wag Site. The red ones have been retired in the last 15 years or so. With less than 40 remaining, you might want to grab a photo of the survivors while you can.

Color	Status
	Active at last check
	Retired or removed

Surviving anachronisms? Sure. Historic? Yes, and until BNSF or Amtrak decides differently, the signal at Delhi will keep wagging each way, twice a day.◊