butter and eggs, one of canned goods, one of lumber, and one of oats. Several of the empty cars were reduced to little more than kindling. The track was torn up for a distance of about 200 feet. “Upon receipt of the news of the
wreck here, W. J. Fordham a conductor, who had been sent north with an extra at 3:45 o'clock was stopped at Gifford and hurried back here to take the wrecker and crew to Steamboat Rock. During the night no effort was made to get any trains but passengers thru. The trains with the heaviest equip- ment and engines were detoured by the way of Gifford over the [Chicago &] Northwestern (sic), to Webster City, and from there over the I.C. [Illinois Central] to Ackley. No. 6, the south- bound night passenger, made this roundabout journey, reaching here at 9 o’clock this morning. The lighter trains were detoured by way of Eldora, the Northwestern to Iowa Falls, and the I.C. to Ackley. No 3, the northbound passenger, ran no farther than Eldora Tuesday evening. There it remained during the night returning south as No. 4 this morning. When it was an- nounced in the northbound passenger No. 3 last night that the train would not go farther than Eldora, many pas- sengers due for points north of there got off and remained here.
“It is not known how long it will take
before the wreckage is cleared and the bridge repaired sufficiently to be used, but it will probably not be before some time Thursday.”
Although there was considerable damage and loss claims to the railroad, there were no fatalities and (miracu- lously) no injuries. Less than two years later, the company’s luck would run out.
Bad day No. 3 March 4, 1913, was not a good day for the M&StL. Another wreck, this time a collision, occurred at the foot of the 1.5 per cent grade descending east- ward at Steamboat Rock. There is a timecard rule limiting the speed of freight trains over the Iowa River Bridge to 10 m.p.h., and on curves and descending grades between Abbott and Steamboat Rock to 20 miles per hour. Train Extra 433 was a stock train, consisting of eleven loaded stock cars and a caboose. Extra 433 departed Ma- son City, Iowa, 56.6 miles to the north of Steamboat Rock at 3:45 a.m., arriv- ing at the collision site at about 10:00 a.m. The conductor’s instructions were to pick up four cars of livestock from the
stockyard track at Steamboat
Rock. This he accordingly did, by first taking water, then parking the rear end of his train on the mainline and pulling onto the house track to attend
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
to the switching of the livestock cars. Upon uncoupling from his train, Extra 433’s engineer whistled for his flagman to deploy and protect the train. The flagman had proceeded approximately 2,200 feet back (his estimate) when scheduled train 94 appeared from around one of the above-mentioned blind curves. Train 94 was, as mentioned, a regu- larly scheduled merchandise train. On this day, it was running more than two hours late as it passed Abbott, the depot 4.4 miles west of Steamboat Rock. It was travelling at an average speed of more than 30 m.p.h., a little fast for this stretch of railroad as the timecard speed for this stretch is 20 m.p.h. As the train passed Abbott, the engineer did a
brake reduction of 20 pounds making the emergency stoppage that was about to be needed very problematic. As their train was about eight car lengths from the rear end of Extra 433, the engineer, head brakeman and fire- man all
leapt from the cab. They
agreed that Train 94 was running about 20 m.p.h. at the point of impact. There were three drovers riding in
the caboose at the moment of impact. Two were killed instantly and a third (about whom we’ll talk more in just a moment) was severely injured. The ICC report on this accident is unusually blunt: “A material contributing cause of the accident was the failure of Flagman Ross [of Extra 433] to go back a suffi-
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