In the great depression of the 1930’s, unemployed people in North America, frequently rode freight trains to commute across the continent in an endless search for work. In the freezing cold of winter and the stifling heat of summer, they rode in open and closed freight filled box cars, sometimes for days to reach a hopeful destination to find work.
During those long train journeys, they had to contend with finding enough food, and often with unscrupulous train riders who frequently preyed on those unable to fend for themselves.
‘The Bulls’… so called, hired by the railroad companies to intimidate and harass; were a constant menace. They patrolled the stations and sidings, intimidating anyone trying to embark on a freight car for a free ride. It was a needless service because most of the bulls were corrupt, and any train rider with something of value could be overlooked if they relinquished their few valuable possessions.
Some freight trains included passenger coaches, for the few who could afford a ticket, but there were always risk takers who tried to embark without. However it was considered a grave crime in those days if they were caught and penalties could be severe.
______________________________
Jack an unemployed miner and a compulsive gambler, had run into hard times working the poker tables that were common on Canadian mines. Never more than a few months in each one, he usually got taken on as an underground laborer. However, his real intent was to take advantage of the vulnerable miners and amateurish, would-be gamblers, who were willing to forfeit their earnings against professionals. Jack was one of these until his luck ran out.
One night he fell asleep on a bench in the train station at Golden, a small town in Southeast British Columbia. He had nowhere to go on that cold windy night in November of 1931.
A trans Canada train had just arrived at the station, bound for Vancouver on the west coast, a journey on the long slow winding railroad through the Rocky Mountains.
The train was hauled by a steam locomotive with twenty-three cars, mostly closed box cars packed with a variety of freight. There were also four tank cars filled with heavy thick crude from the oil fields of Alberta, as well as two passenger coaches.
All vacant space in the box cars were filled with people that had come from various destinations across the country, endlessly seeking work.
In Golden some riders had to vacate their space on the train while two box cars were removed and replaced with one filled with local freight. During this period, the Bulls patrolled the length of the train, harassing anyone they found near it, but cautious to bypass box cars already occupied, especially with large groups of riders. Retaliation against patrolling Bulls could be quite violent.
A sympathetic couple, a man and his wife on the station, about to embark on one of the coaches, had seen Jack asleep on the bench. He was dead to the world! They had assumed he was intending to get on the train and decided to put him in the warmth of the same coach that they were about to get onto. Without his awareness, in a half-conscious state, they helped him onto the train, into a compartment where he went back into a deep sleep.
When he awoke several hours later, it was the conductor shaking him and demanding to see his ticket. He had no idea he was on a train and by then the train had long departed Golden.
The conductor could have put him off, but he had more compassion than to do so on such a cold windy night. Instead, he let him remain in the coach, but on the floor, huddled up in a corner of the compartment. Jack was a very calm and polite man and good at talking his way out of any difficult situation.
He expressed his gratitude to the conductor but not to the man and his wife, who had got him into this difficult predicament, despite their good intentions. He had not wanted to be on the train in the first place, but fate does have its mysterious ways.
___________________________________
It was the same train that left Golden that cold windy day, which the ‘Little People’ predicted would meet with a catastrophic accident. The whole community, throughout the extent of their habitat knew it would happen. They had already begun to collaborate a plan to prevent or limit the extent of damage that might be caused. They knew when and where the accident would occur, that the train would plunge from a railroad embankment sixty feet above the rapidly flowing ‘Kicking Horse’ river where it flowed through a narrow mountain pass, about three hours running time on the train from Golden.
The “Little People“
The ‘Little People,’ goblin like in stature and size, had lived in the mountains for time immemorial. They were the guardians of the environment, the mountains, rivers and forests and everything that lived within. They had always lived in obscurity, for their existence was in another dimension. They had a unique ability to become instantly invisible and it was only on rare occasions they exposed themselves to the outside world. With exceptional intellect and physical strength, they were a psychic people with an extrasensory perception to predict and foresee the future, even from far away in the deep forested mountain valleys where they lived in several hidden communities. People from the cities in early days seldom ventured into remote forested areas of the Canadian bush except for an occasional trapper, prospector or explorer looking for the fabled ‘Big Foot’ that was rumored to inhabit the densely forested mountain regions.
The few that had ever seen the ‘little People’ had talked about the existence of a strange ‘manlike’ creature that was only ever seen for short instances before disappearing into the forest.
The rumor proliferated through generations and the size of the ‘forest creature’ increased into what was imagined and became known as ‘Big Foot’ and sometimes ‘Sasquatch’.
People being what they were in those days, preferred the perception, the mystery of a giant like creature instead of the real one that was even smaller than they were, and so the legend endured.
These guardians of the forest relied heavily on the resources of their environment, for they too had similar needs. They had to eat and drink and make and build, but they had always done so with foresight and respect to the environment, never unaware of the needs and natural limitations of normal people. They were compelled to prevent the accident they knew would occur, because the thick crude oil from the ruptured tank cars would contaminate and ruin the river for a long time. The river was crucial to the life blood of their existence.
Unknown to anyone on the train that day, five ‘Little People’ boarded it on a curve from an outcrop of rock that overhung the railroad track, close to the top of a mountain pass. It was before the beginning of a long down grade embankment that squeezed through the pass, shared with the river. The train had slowed right down at this point.
The locomotive pulling the train, began its decent at a normal slow speed. Most of the twenty-two cars where still on the upgrade, but as the train load diminished going over the pass, its speed began to increase. When the engineer began to apply brakes to maintain a regulated speed, they had no effect. Speed was increasing at an alarming rate as all the cars were over the crest of the pass and now on the downgrade.
The brakes were not responding at all. It was completely out of control and had now become a ‘Runaway Train’!
The engineer had no recourse he could think of. He was panic stricken with no control of his heavy train. The fireman who should have been shoveling coal into the firebox to generate and maintain steam pressure, was in a similar state.
It flashed through his mind the catastrophic dilemma they were in. He had to react and do something. His concern…. the box cars full of innocent, poor, penniless people braving the freezing cold wind of the mountain weather on their hopeless journey to find work…the tank cars full of thick crude oil, destined to roll off the track, bouncing off the rocks on their fall from the embankment, tearing their containment that would spill into the crystal-clear water of the rapidly flowing ‘Kicking Horse’ river’ sixty feet below.
Suddenly Jack, the unemployed miner appeared on the footplate of the locomotive. He reacted instantly when the conductor told him they were on a ‘Runaway Train’ because of brake failure. He quickly made his way over the top of the two coaches, through four box cars, onto the coal tender, then onto the footplate where the Engineer and fireman drove the train.
He seemed to know exactly what to do to slow the train down. He told the engineer that the locomotive needed to be put into reverse so that the big driving wheels would turn in the opposite direction. This would create reverse traction and slow the train down. He knew how to do this on that style of engine because Jack was also a knowledgeable steam locomotive fitter mechanic from a previous life.
Looking at the gauges above the firebox he saw that steam pressure was far too low. He realized the steam assisted reversing gear was not going to work. Changing the steam valve into reverse would have to be done manually.
With a big steel bar Jack went out onto the open side of the locomotive, now running down the track at well over a safe speed, the engine rocking from side to side. He held onto the handrail along the side of the massive boiler with one hand. The other gripped the steel bar.
Bending down on the boiler platform above the huge steel rods connecting the wheels, turning round and round, back and forth, at a crushing speed, he reached out, and with the steel rod, pushing with all his might, he moved a link that caused reverse motion.
The train suddenly lurched as the big driving wheels stopped for an instant and then began to turn in the opposite direction, reversing wheel traction and reducing train speed; but was it sufficient?
He made his way back to the footplate to find the fireman desperately shoveling coal into the firebox at an uncanny rate. It was like something unseen assisting him, feeding the fire with coal to generate more steam in the boiler. Steam pressure soon came back to normal, and he could begin to increase reverse traction, hopefully to slow the train down even more.
_______________________________________
With their exceptional powers, their ability to see into the future, the ‘Little People’ had already installed an arresting system for the ‘Runaway Train’. Part of it… a massive chain wrapped around the inside of the rail track at the beginning of the downgrade on the embankment and laid between the rails for a distance equivalent to half the length of the train. The second part was installed on the Locomotive, unknown to anyone, during its layover in Golden. A large diameter wire cable fixed around the rear axles of the engine with a huge hook hanging below it. If the train had not sufficiently slowed down from reversed traction, the hook on the cable could be deployed. It would catch the heavy chain that was fixed to the inside of the railroad track and arrest the speed.
Two ‘Little People’ were underneath the Locomotive, sitting on the shaking axle boxes as it raced down the track, waiting for the train to slow down…. It did not!
They instantly deployed the hook and caught the arresting chain that lay between the rails. It worked similar to the way aircraft landed on carrier ships in the first world war. It was where they got the idea.
As the slack in the chain was taken up, suddenly there was a great lurch as the racing train slowed down. A deafening screech of grinding steel and continuous banging echoed through the mountains, as the rail track tore away from its stone ballasted foundation, winding into a loop, like stretching a massive spring as the speeding train was arrested to a complete stop.
_________________________________
Although it was the ‘little people’ that ultimately saved the ‘Runaway Train,’ who averted a complete catastrophe and saved the lives of so many people…. Jack had been given all the credit!
It was he who reacted in an instant when alerted by the conductor. He who knew what to do to slow the train down, and he who actually did It!!
If the train had been going too fast, the arrester might not have stopped it before it reached the end of the grade. The train could have never negotiated the curve of the track that followed. A catastrophic disaster would have been inevitable.
Jack was highly commended for what he did that night, especially by the railroad company. They rewarded him handsomely and even though the rail track was pulled up and severely damaged, it was only a fraction of the cost, had the train met with the catastrophe which the ‘Little People’ had predicted. No one would ever know that, although the railroad company must have realized what the outcome might have been without the arrester. They knew that something had been attached to the runaway train, that was also fixed to the rail track, to cause the track to be pulled completely out of its foundation over a considerable distance.
What about the arrester? The remains were never found. The long heavy chain fixed to the rail track, the cable and hook on the rear axles of the locomotive. It had all gone… simply disappeared! What was clearly evident after the arrestment, the marks left behind on the track and sleeper ties, and on the locomotive axles, caused by an extremely high force, and the remains of the wrapped-up rail track directly behind the last box car.
Jack was never again unemployed. He never sat at another poker table. He became quite a wealthy man through his deed that day.
What about the ‘little people’? No one would ever know about them. They remained in obscurity, unknown to the world of normal people. They were good with that!
Evidence of small footprints were all around the scene of the accident until the mountain weather wiped them out.
The legend of ‘Big Foot’ remained intact and they were also good with that! What a disappointment if the truth was ever revealed and ‘Big Foot’ in fact, was found to be only a ‘Little Foot’. The legend was nearly broken on this occasion of the mountain incident, during the days of the great depression and the ‘Runaway Train’.
MAD.