The Wrecker

Fourteen-year-old Billy couldn’t believe his amazing luck to be riding in a locomotive. He’d been mooning over trains rumbling past his house his whole life and been up all night excited about this trip. But he had never dreamed he could actually ride up front in the cab. Mr. Patrick wore a striped cap just like you saw in pictures and was the surest, calmest man Billy had ever seen. He had explained what he was doing every step of the way, as he sounded two long blasts on the whistle and started the train moving again.

“We’re off, Billy! I’m dropping the Johnson bar to full forward. All the way forward to go ahead, all the way back for reverse. We can go just as fast backward as forward.”

Patrick gripped a long, horizontal bar. “Now I’m opening the throttle, sending steam to the cylinders to turn the drive wheels, and I’m opening the sand valve to get adhesion on the rails. Now I’m pulling back on the throttle so we don’t start too fast. You feel her bite and not slipping?”

Billy had nodded eagerly. She had picked up speed smooth as silk as Patrick began notching out the throttle.

Now rolling toward Glendale on the last few miles before Los Angeles, blowing the whistle at grade crossings, Patrick told the awestruck boy, “You’ll never drive a finer locomotive. She’s a good steamer and rides easy.”

The fireman, Zeke Taggert, who had been steadily shoveling coal into the roaring firebox, banged the door shut and sat down to catch his breath. He was a big man, black and greasy, and stunk of sweat. “Billy?” he boomed in a huge voice. “See this here glass?” Taggert tapped a gauge. “It’s the most important window on the train. It shows the water level in the boiler. Too low, the crown sheet heats up and melts, and, BOOM!, blows us all to kingdom come!”

“Don’t pay him no mind, Billy,” Patrick said. “It’s Zeke’s job to be make sure we’ve got plenty in the boiler. We’ve got a tender full of water right behind us.”

“How come the throttle’s in the middle?” asked Billy.

“It sits in the middle when we’re rolling. Right now, that’s all we need to be steaming at sixty miles an hour. Shove her forward, we’d be doing a hundred twenty.”

The engineer winked at Uncle Bill. “The throttle lever also helps us steer her around tight bends. Zeke, do you see any curves coming up?”

“Trestle just ahead, Rufus. Tight bend turning out of it.”

“You take her, son.”

“What?”

“Steer her around the curve. Quick, now! Grab hold. Poke your head out here and look.”

Billy took the throttle in his left hand and leaned out the window the same way the engineer had.

The throttle was hot, pulsing in his hand like it was alive. The beam of the locomotive headlight gleamed along the rails. Billy saw the trestle coming up. It looked very narrow.

“Just a light touch,” Rufus Patrick cautioned with another wink at the men. “Hardly need to move it at all. Easy. Easy. Yep, you’re getting the hang of it. But you gotta get her right down the middle. It’s a mighty tight fit.”

Zeke and Uncle Bob exchanged grins.

“Look out, now. Yep, you’re doing fine. Just ease her-”

“What’s that up ahead, Mr. Patrick?”

Rufus Patrick looked where the boy was pointing.

The beam of the locomotive headlight was throwing shadows and reflections from the ironwork in the trestle, which made it hard to see. Probably just a shadow. Suddenly, the headlight glinted on something strange.

“What the-?” In the company of a child, Patrick automatically switched cusswords to “blue blazes.”

It was a hooked hunk of metal reaching up from the right rail like a hand from a shallow grave.

“Hit the air!” Patrick yelled to the fireman.

Zeke threw himself on the air-brake lever and yanked it with all this might. The train slowed so violently, it seemed to hit a wall. But only for a moment. An instant later, the weight of ten fully loaded passenger cars and a tender filled with tons of coal and water hurled the locomotive forward.

Patrick clapped his own experienced hand on the air brake. He worked the brakes with the fine touch of a clockmaker and eased the Johnson bar into reverse. The great drive wheels spun, screeching in a blaze of fiery sparks, shaving slivers of steel from the rails. The brakes and the reversing drivers decelerated the speeding Coast Line Limited. But it was too late. The high-wheeled Atlantic 4-4-2 was already screaming through the trestle, bearing down on the hook, still making forty miles per hour. Patrick could only pray that the wedge-shaped pilot, the so-called cowcatcher that swept along the tracks in front of the locomotive, would sweep it aside before it caught the engine truck’s front axle.

Instead, the iron hook that the Wrecker had bolted to the loosened rail latched onto the pilot with a death grip. It tore loose the rail ahead of the front wheels on the right side of the one-hundred-eighty-six-thousand-pound locomotive. Her massive drive wheels crashed onto the ties, bouncing on wood and ballast at forty miles an hour.

The speed, the weight, and the relentless momentum crushed the edge of the bed and ground the ties to splinters. The wheels dropped into air, and, still racing forward, the engine began to careen onto its side, dragging its tender with it. The tender pulled the baggage car over the edge, and the baggage car dragged the first passenger car with it before the coupling to the second passenger car broke free.

Then, almost miraculously, the locomotive seemed to right itself. But it was a brief respite. Shoved by the weight of the tender and cars, it twisted and turned and skidded down the embankment, sliding until it smashed its mangled pilot and headlight into the rock-hard bottom of the dry riverbed.

It stopped at last, tilted at a steep angle, with its nose down and its trailing truck in the air. The water in the tightly sealed boiler, which was superheated to three hundred eighty degrees, spilled forward, off the red-hot crown plate, which was at the back of the boiler.

“Get out!” roared the engineer. “Get out before she blows!”

Bill was sprawled unconscious against the firebox. Little Billy was sitting dazed on the footplate, holding his head. Blood was pouring through his fingers.

Zeke, like Patrick, had braced for the impact and not been hurt badly.

“Grab Bill,” Patrick told Zeke, who was a powerful man. “I’ve got the boy.”

Patrick slung Billy under his arm like a gu

“Run!”

The coal fire that Zeke Taggert had shoveled so hard to feed was still raging under the locomotive’s crown plate. Burning fiercely to maintain the twenty-two hundred degrees necessary to boil two thousand gallons of water, it continued to heat the steel. But with no water above it to absorb the heat, the temperature of the steel soared from its normal six hundred degrees to the fire’s twenty-two hundred. At that temperature, the half-inch-thick plate softened like butter in a skillet.

Two-hundred-pounds-per-square-inch steam pressure inside the boiler was fourteen times ordinary air pressure outside. It took only seconds for the captive steam to exploit the sudden weakness and burst a hole in the crown plate.

Even as the steam escaped, two thousand gallons of water pressure-cooked to three hundred eighty degrees also turned to steam the instant it came in contact with the chill Glendale air. Its volume multiplied by a thousand six hundred times. In a flash, two thousand gallons of water vaporized into three million gallons of steam. Trapped inside the 4-4-2 Atlantic’s boiler, it expanded outward with a concussive roar that exploded the steel locomotive into a million small pieces of shrapnel.