Walking from his home on 32nd Street, Kansas Pacific Railroad engineer John Bacon crossed the bridge over the South Platte River.
The river was swollen and muddy from the rains.
The battered remains of a large freight wagon were wedged against the bridge pilings by the current. It had flipped sideways and its woodspoked wheels were spinning crazily, like a badly injured animal lying on the ground kicking its legs. It almost seemed fitting, Bacon thought to himself. Freight wagons were fast becoming antiques.
Steampowered locomotives had rapidly made horse-drawn freight wagons and passenger stagecoaches yesterday's transportation. Bacon sniffed the damp evening air. A strong breeze bore the smell of fresh mud and coal smoke from the railyard. Continuing across the bridge, he walked down a dirty alley, then stepped over four sets of track rails toward the dispatch office.
He scuffed the mud from his boots on a burlap sack and stepped inside. The floor was wood-planked and still new enough to retain the scent of pine sap. A pot-bellied stove with a blue-enameled coffeepot stood in the far corner. Nodding at the stout Friar Tuck-built man alongside a standing desk, Bacon made his way to the pot. Reaching for a metal cup hanging on a nail, he wiped away a coating of dust with a handkerchief, then filled it with steaming coffee.
The stout man, dispatcher Chester Tubbs, was marking a railroad scheduling chart, using a straight-edge ruler and a pencil. Tubbs was nearing his fifty-fourth year and had worked for the railroad for over thirty of them. "Wet enough for you, John?" Tubbs said without looking up.
"Come August, we'll be glad we had this downpour," Bacon replied.
"The farmers out on the eastern plains don't mind it at all."
Tubbs shifted from one leg to the other, held up his chart, and pointed with the pencil. "You'll be running Train #8 to Kansas City."
"What's the cargo?" Bacon inquired.
"Scrap railroad iron."
"What engine did you assign me?" "No. 51." "Baldwin 4-6-0," Bacon said easily. "Good engine with plenty of traction."
"Even so, you'll have to keep up a good head of steam with this load," said Tubbs.
"How many cars?"
"Twenty-five and a caboose," replied Tubbs.
Bacon mentally estimated the approximate weight of twenty-five freight cars loaded with heavy scrap rail iron pulled by a locomotive driving over wet rails. "It's a downgrade from here to Kansas. I should have no trouble keeping your schedule."
"Just so long as the storm doesn't follow you across the plains."
"Did you crew me with my brother-in-law, Frank Seldon?" Bacon asked.
Tubbs nodded. "I also scheduled your poker pal George Platt as your brakeman."
"You're a good man," Bacon said cheerfully.
"Have to keep the engineers happy," Tubbs replied, smiling.
"When my crew arrives, tell them I'll be on No. 51, " Bacon said, finishing his coffee and hanging the cup back on the nail.
Leaving the dispatch office, Bacon walked along the track leading to Engine #51. He found it standing cold and silent on a siding, coupled to its coal tender. He paused and glanced toward the southeast. Far over the plains toward Elbert County, shafts of lightning exploded against black skies. Thunder quickly followed and rumbled ominously. It was turning into a very nasty night indeed.
Frank Seldon and George Platt walked the tracks from the dispatch office together. A brass lantern flickered inside the cab of Engine #51, and a wisp of smoke curled from the locomotive's tall diamond-topped smokestack As the men climbed the ladder to the cab, they heard the heavy boiler door being slammed.
"The engineer doing a fireman's work?" Seldon said to Bacon with a grin.
"Somebody's got to put fire in the beast so we can make our schedule," Bacon said to his brother-in-law half in jest. "Is Platt with you?"
The answer came with the sound of a pair of size-thirteen boots clumping onto the cab's iron floor as George Platt climbed inside.
Platt was muscular but badly overweight in the wrong places. His arms were the size of most men's legs, thick and bulky. Each of the cars in the train had a manual brake, and Platt's job was to engage the brakes when necessary. The brake wheels did not Turn easily, but Platt's great strength gave him a distinct advantage.
"Evening,"9 said Platt in a chipper tone.
"Evening, George," greeted Bacon. "How was your day off?"
"Mary made me take her to the Sloan's Lake ballroom."
Bacon smiled. "Somehow, I can't imagine you waltzing on a ballroom floor."
Platt ignored the ribbing. "Tubbs said the train is coupled and sitting on track twelve. If you and Frank bring #51 around when you've got steam, I'll be waiting to hook you up."
"We'll be there soon as we can," said Bacon as Seldon grabbed a shovel and began banking the fire inside the furnace.
Fifteen minutes later, Bacon slowly pulled the throttle arm, which was hooked to a rod traveling to the steam dome atop the boiler, where the throttle valves were located. Then he pulled the Johnson bar to send the locomotive into reverse. Seldon jumped down, trotted ahead, and switched the rails so the engine could back onto track twelve and meet Platt, who stood motioning at the front coupling on the lead freight car.
Bacon lightly stroked the throttle arm, easing the coupling behind the coal tender into the one on the car.
"Pins in place!" Platt shouted from behind the tender.
Bacon gently eased the throttle arm open. With a series of loud clunking sounds, the couplings took up the slack. Then he gave a sudden pull on the throttle, sending a burst of steam to the piston and spinning the big drive wheels to heave forward the great weight behind Engine #51. Chugging slowly at first, Train #8 to Kansas City crept from the railroad yard in Denver. Passing parallel to Larimer Street, the train began to gather speed.
The Baldwin-built Mogul class 4-6-0 locomotive was the workhorse of the nation's railroads. With four wheels on a pivoting truck at the front and six 54-inch-drive wheels, she was considered a monster for her time, able to pull a long string of heavily laden freight cars up long grades without great strain. Only three years old, Engine #51 was one of only three heavy haulers in the Kansas Pacific Railroad's rolling stock. Though she was normally scheduled to pull trains over the mountains, this trip called for her immense power to transport the ponderous load of scrap iron to the smelters in the East.
Black paint covered most of her metal, now glistening under a film of water. Thin hand-painted red striping outlined the rims of her wheels, the cab's window frames, and hand railings above the drivewheels. The cowcatcher, never designed to catch wandering open-range steers but to scoop their dead carcasses off to the side, jutted ahead of the engine just above the rails. Forward of the tall smokestack with its diamond top sat a great headlight, whose kerosene lamp and mirrored reflectors cast a wide beam into the dark night.
After jerking the chain to the steam whistle and pulling the cord to the bell, Bacon braved the rain and leaned out the side window as the engine passed over Steele Street and the outskirts of the city toward the great flatlands stretching from the Rockies to the Mississippi River.
Train #8 was now steaming on her monotonous eastward run across a landscape devoid of trees and shrubs. No one on board had a premonition that this would be their last run together.
Fifty miles down track a wall Of surging water smashed into Bridge 607.80. The flood arrived with a surge not borne by anger or revenge, but simply enormous momentum assisted by gravity. Slamming into the bridge supports, wooden pilings driven eight feet deep into the streambed, the churning water snapped them into huge slivers and washed them away. Swept downstream by the unholy force of the raging stream, the pilings were tossed crazily about like straws in a hurricane. The iron rails atop the bridge swayed without their supports but remained suspended, creating an illusion of safe passage.
Jesse Dillup was lying in a scooped-out hole alongside the swollen stream below the Kansas Pacific tracks and underneath a grove of cottonw
oods. A tattered wool blanket, now soaked by the drenching rain, was clutched around his shoulders. His few meager belongings were bundled in a haversack at his feet. He sneezed and rose from his muddy shelter.
Dillup was on his way from Texas to California, catching rides in empty freight cars. There was work in California, or so he heard. His journey was built on the hope his luck would finally change. He had recently gambled away what little he had amassed in his life and was nearly broke as he made his way west. A small supply of food, what few personal effects he carried in his tote, and four dollars in coin were all he possessed.
The hole, its bottom now a deep puddle, was no longer habitable, and the river was rising toward his shelter at an alarming rate, so he decided to wander further west in hope of finding a more comfortable place on higher ground to spend the ungodly night. Climbing quickly up the grade to the ballast stones under the ties and rails, he paused when he reached the tracks and out of habit peered back through the rain for an approaching train. Instead of the light from a locomotive he saw the shattered remains of Bridge 607.80 under a series of flashes from lightning bolts. The iron rails hung suspended in the air above the torrent of rushing water. As he watched, the huge trunk of a cottonwood tree smashed into the eastern base of the bridge and ripped loose the last of the supports. The wooden skeleton that gave the bridge its strength was now completely gone.
Dillup raced along the track toward the nearby town of Kiowa Crossing, intent on warning the stationmaster. Slipping on the wet ties, he fell and gashed his knee on a spike. Wrapping a rag from his pocket around the wound, he continued stumbling west over the track.
A trail of cinders, sparks, and thick smoke spewed from the stack of Engine #51 as it raced eastward toward the bridge. Frank Seldon kept the furnace blazing and the boiler at full steam while Bacon kept a close eye on the gauges. The rain had diminished a bit, slightly increasing his range of vision under the headlight. He pulled the throttle another notch as he sent the locomotive thundering over the wet rails.
Toward the center of the train, George Platt moved from car to car, checking the brake settings and making sure the backup ratchets functioned properly.
Oblivious of the danger that was rapidly approaching, the men on board Train #8 had only seven minutes to live.
Safe from the storm inside the stationhouse at Kiowa Crossing less than a mile from the bridge over the creek, Abner Capp was dealing a round of cards on a table, playing four hands by himself. He paused and nibbled on a sliced turkey sandwich his wife had packed for his lateevening meal. The big Seth Thomas clock on one wall read two minutes to midnight.
The interior of the small wooden stationhouse was comfortably warm. Capp shuddered at the thought of stepping outside in the damp gloom. Still, the schedule of trains was specific and he had to be standing by the tracks as Train #8 traveled through in case any mail or company instructions were extended off the train by a conductor with a stick and caught in a small hand-held net by the stationmaster. Capp wasn't aware that this night Train #8 was not carrying a conductor.
He was slipping on his overcoat when Jesse Dillup burst through the door, looking like a drowned rat.
"The bridge is out!" Dillup gasped.
Capp stared at the bedraggled traveler. Dillup's hair hung in wet ringlets and was plastered against a face badly in need of a shave.
His clothes were tattered and old, and his pants were torn and bloody where he had cut his knee.
"Have you been drinking?" Capp asked directly.
"No, by God!" Dillup snapped. "I'm telling you the bridge east of here has been washed out by floodwaters. The rails hang over the track with nothing under them. The supports are gone."
Two short miles to the west, the shrill steam whistle of Engine #51 broke the splattering sound of rain on the station roof. Time was running out.
Less than four minutes' running time from the little town of Kiowa Crossing, the freight train raced east toward the bridge that no longer existed. Seldon sat back in his small metal seat, resting after stoking the furnace into an inferno. Bacon partially tilted his face around the window frame and peered through one eye, trying to pierce the watery darkness ahead.
Seven cars back, George Platt adjusted a dragging brake, and then began to make his way forward to the locomotive for a few moments of warmth and a short chat with Bacon and Seldon.
Twenty-five flatcars, each loaded with twenty thousand pounds of scrap iron, gathered momentum on the slight downgrade that ran east toward the Colorado-Kansas border.
Capp tossed a spare raincoat to Dillup and handed him a brass lantern with a red glass lens. Then he motioned toward the bridge.
"You go east toward the bridge and hang this light on the post alongside the tracks."
"Sure you don't want me to head west to warn the train?" asked Dillup.
"I'll take care of that chore. Since you've got an injured leg, I'll make faster time than you." CaPp threw open the door to a chill gust of wind and rain. "Go now!" Then he jumped onto the track and began his futile attempt to wave down the train.
The sound of the rapidly approaching locomotive reached the men running in opposite directions down the track. Capp moved faster than Dillup, but he had further to go. He did not reach the eastern light wanung pole before the train was upon him. He waved the red lantern frantically high over his head, praying the engineer would see it.
But at that instant, Bacon had turned his attention from the track ahead to check on the gauges. Capp and his frenzied signal were unseen. His panic mushrooming, Capp hurled the lantern against the side of the cab. But he misjudged the speed of Train #8 and threw too late.
The lantern smashed against the wall of the coal tender behind the locomotive cab and went unnoticed.
Dillup limped down the tracks as fast as his injured leg could take him. Reaching the signal pole, he climbed the ladder and hooked the lantern in place high above the track. Then he lowered himself to the ground beside the pole just as the light from the Baldwin locomotive transfixed his body in its glare.
John Bacon spotted Dillup and the red lantern. He responded immediately, jerking the steam-whistle cord twice in rapid succession.
Still not knowing the reason for the stop signal, he fervently hoped George Platt was in position to engage the brakes. He shoved the throttle closed and pulled the Johnson bar in almost the same movement.
Then he yanked open the throttle again, sending the big drive wheels rotating madly in reverse.
"They gave us a red light outside of Kiowa Crossing," he shouted to Seldon.
"The Kiowa Creek bridge must be washed out!" Seldon shot back.
"Has to be. I can't think of another reason to flag down a freight train on a night like this."
Platt was only two cars back when he heard the twin screams of the whistle. Without hesitation, he spun the wheel on the freight car that locked the front brakes. Then he leaped across the scrap rails stacked on the flatcar and raced to the rear brake before engaging it as well.
Then it was on to the next car, where he repeated the procedure.
The crew had reacted amazingly fast, but the train's momentum was just too great.
Capp hurried down the tracks, chasing the red light on the back of the caboose. He ran recklessly over the rail ties. As if in a nightmare, he felt his heart thumping against his rib cage.
Two hundred yards ahead of Capp, the wind draft whipped Dillup's raincoat as the train roared past. He suddenly realized there was no way the train could stop in time. He had done all he could do, but it was not enough.
"I think we're okay," said Bacon, seeing the locomotive's light beam reflect on the rails ahead.
"Looks like the bridge still stands," said Seldon unknowingly, as he leaned out the opposite window of the cab.
With the brakes of three cars locked by Platt, whistle screeching, drive wheels spinning in reverse, Train #8 was slowing as it traveled down the raised trackbed coming out of Kiowa Crossing, but was far
from stopping as it rolled across the unsupported rails. The train's great momentum carried it nearly midway across the mad sweep of floodwater before the twin strands of iron broke and contorted under the weight of a hundred tons of heavy metal. Twisting like a dying serpent, the locomotive and eighteen of the twenty-five cars rolled into the raging water, where they were flipped end over end by the irresistible flood into one entangled mass of wreckage. Debris and rails were ripped off the flatbed cars and shoved downstream as if shot from a cannon.
Bacon, Seldon, and Platt died almost instantly, their bodies pummeled and swept downstream.
From his position on the tracks above Kiowa Creek, Jesse Dillup stood in mute horror as he watched the big headlight of Engine #51 plunge beneath the water, still glowing for a few seconds until the front lens was smashed and the swirling water extinguished it.