Editor’s Note: The following is an account of a jinxed locomotive by Alex Hyslop. It has been edited and adapted for use here by retired Idaho State University history professor Jo Ann Ruckman. The article first appeared in the Pocatello Tribune on March 20, 1900.
Any mention of the Hoodoo locomotive “50” among railroad men or during any switch shanty session is very likely to call up reminisces of her record of disaster.
She began her career on the South Park Railroad through the mountains of Colorado and was known as the “South Park Hoodoo.” If an engine struck a landslide, it was the “50.”
She had a great reputation as a discoverer of broken rails and invariably followed the discovery with a plunge into a mountain ravine. Out of all these scrapes she would emerge from the back shops with all traces of her recent disaster removed, but still holding her reputation, while the luckless crew would yet be in the hospital or had been consigned to the scrap heap for all time.
On her first trip, “50” left the rail, through some pretext or other, with a heavy train of ore and on a down grade, and after some days the wreckers found her in the bottom of the canyon, the underdog in a pile of debris that had once constituted a train of cars with its lading.
They also found Sam Willard, the engineer, with his left leg cooked to the knee, where it had been pressed against the boiler head by the coal pile. Sam was alive and recovered, but Bill Redding, his fireman, had been killed right away, as one of the wreckers expressed it.
Sam had his leg amputated and about a year later again appeared for work. It is a strange coincidence that Sam lost his left leg on the maiden trip of the “50” and lost his right leg on the same engine on the last trip she ever made on the South Park.
Sam’s last mishap was in a collision where he was about to jump before they struck, but he was caught in the gangway and his remaining leg was sacrificed. Strange, too, but Sam recovered from this, had sticks fitted to his stumps and ran locomotives until, like many others, he went out in the great strike of 1894.
In the interval, between her first and last trips on the South Park, seven more men lost their lives on the “50” and as many had been maimed or seriously injured. Her last victim, previous to Willard’s second wreck with her, was Engineer John Wiggins, who had both legs broken by the breaking of the back side rod on the engineer’s side, which plowed and thrashed through the cab until the fireman brought the train to a stop.
However, Wiggins and all the rest of the South Park engineers and firemen had nothing more to fear from the Hoodoo. About this time it suited the Union Pacific’s financial policy to wreck the South Park and having transferred the traffic to the Denver and Rio Grande, the locomotives, including the “50,” were transferred to the then-narrow gauge Utah and Northern railway, connecting Ogden, Utah, with Butte, Mont., and passing through Idaho.
This was in the winter of 1885-1886, and in the early morning of the 13th of May of the latter year the “50’s” headlight was put out forever in one of the strangest and most disastrous wrecks ever recorded. The road was a narrow gauge, but the management had decided to make it standard, and preparatory to this work was transporting to the north end the new 60-pound steel rails for the standard-gauge track.
Early in May, a brakemen’s strike — one of those chronic eruptions that they used to saycould originate nowhere but on the seventh and eighth districts of the Wyoming division of the Union Pacific — spread to the Idaho division, of which E.P. Blickensderfer was superintendent. Blick, as he was called, fired the strikers and in a few days was operating with a new, but for the most part, inexperienced lot of brakemen.
On the night of May 12, 1886, the “50” carried green signals for a triple-header as third section of Train 527, the preceding section, like this one, consisting of 11 narrow-gauge cars loaded with steel rails and a caboose. These cars were but 28 feet in length, and in order to load the 34-foot rails it was necessary to remove the brake staff. At that period, too, the use of the automatic air was confined to passenger trains.
The “50,” piloting the “17” and “24,” pulled out of the division terminal — at that time called Eagle Rock, under which name it acquired a notoriety that the town thought to rid itself of by adopting the present more romantic name of Idaho Falls.
At a snail pace the three engines dragged their load up the 3 percent grade toward the divide, which marks the boundary of Idaho and Montana, and about 3:30 a.m. of the 13th were within five miles of Dry Creek, the next telegraph station, with a steep pull before them.
The second section had reached Dry Creek and there received orders to do some switching, which the conductor, with his two green brakemen, both of whom were making their first trip over the road, proceeded to do. It was necessary to place the 11 cars of steel on a siding, the switch of which at the lower end of the yards had not been disturbed and was still set for the mainline.
While the men were working elsewhere, the cars, being on a slight grade, and with no brakes, began to move downhill. One of the brakemen, noticing it, jumped on the first car to set a brake. As stated, all the brake staffs had been removed to accommodate the rails, but the brakeman was not aware of that fact and hoping to avoid a derailment in the yard, he jumped off and ran ahead to open the switch, which he threw for the mainline.
In the first mile the cars, heavily laden with steel rails, had attained the velocity of an express train on the heavy downgrade, but they had yet four miles to go before they met the upcoming third section, piloted by the hoodoo “50.”
The upcoming train could see only so far as the headlight of the “50” penetrated the darkness, and the three engine crews were all equally unwarned of the approaching danger. George Flood was engineer of the “50” and Jimmy Clark, a mere boy, was his fireman. George Oram and Billy Purdie were on the “17” and Bert Chapman and Azeal Keach on the “24.”
Jimmy Clark was down putting in a fire when the crash came, and according to the verdict of the coroner’s jury was “killed in four different places.” Every flue in the “50s” boiler was driven back through the boiler head, through the coal pile and actually through the two sheets forming the back of the tank, and rails weighing half a ton apiece accompanied the flues side by side.
Flood was pinned into the cab, and was scalded externally and internally with steam to such an extent that he was considered as good as dead, though the decision was a hasty one.
The crew of the second engine was knocked out of the cab and escaped practically unhurt, though Oram maintains to this day that he was sent flying through the air over his own tank, over Chapman’s engine and that he finally landed on Chapman’s tank.
Chapman himself was slightly injured by being thrown out of his cab, but Keach, his fireman, had his right leg caught and smashed to a pulp in the gangway.
Poor Keach! He deserved to live, for his courage was superb. Whipping out his knife, he cut off the shattered member, thus freeing himself. He then crawled into the sagebrush, and, with his handkerchief and a sage limb which he cut, formed a tourniquet and stopped the flow of blood.
Then he composed himself in the cold of the early dawn and awaited the arrival of the relief train. His wounded limb received such excellent surgical treatment that he died in the hospital four days later.
Flood, whose condition appeared so much more serious, recovered, and is still in service on the same piece of track, as are also Oram, Chapman and Purdie. At the wreck, daylight revealed a sight magnificently terrible. Rails were shot like arrows for 200 feet from the point where the collision occurred and after winging their half ton of weight through the air, drove themselves a third of their length into the earth.
And the rails from the runaway cars wreaked awful vengeance on the miscreant “50.” Had she been made the target for a large-caliber cannon, her demolition could not have been more complete.
There was just nothing left of her but her squatty drivers. The “50,” with two more victims added to her already long list, was forever marked vacant on the equipment list.
So passed the Jonah of South Park, and with her going, went many a sigh of relief from engine men who knew her history.
