Story of the Snowplow Wreck as told to J.G. MacGregor

From Overland by the Yellowhead - J. G. MacGregor

Although Ross McKee retired in 1944, he can cast his mind back to the days of nearly sixty years ago when as hogger on a freight creeping west, he nosed his engine into the snowshed just west of Robson station and was confronted suddenly with a great gush of water. He stopped immediately and waited, holding his breath, knowing something was going to happen. It did—a small slide oozed down past the east end of the shed and a large rock knocked the second car from the engine off the track, but “ nobody was hurt,” says Ross McKee.

Another time on the side hill facing Mount Robson, as the engineer eased his locomotive cautiously along, he saw a large rock smack in the middle of the track. While a few other rocks continued to dribble down the mountainside, McKee and the brakeman got out, and as the hogger inched the engine forward, held a tie ahead of the cow-catcher till it pushed the rock over the side. All the while, here and there, an odd football-sized rock came crashing down, “ zip, zip. I had horseshoes in my pocket that time!”

McKee’s most poignant memory, however, is of a snowslide in the same general area, which, extending past the end of the snowshed, covered the track yards deep in snow and ice. “ ’Twas in twenty-two, I think—yes, in twenty-two.” They called him in Jasper at 9 p.m. to drive the extra engine coupled on behind the rotary plow. Shortly after he and the others went to work on the slide, a bearing on the rotary engine heated and threatened to seize up. Paddy Bateman, the rotary engineer, signaled McKee that they would back out of the cut they had made till the engineer decided they were clear of the danger area and could stop to
examine the bearing. When they stopped, McKee, looking out his cab window in the dark, could just make out the CNR grade above them on the mountainside, while looking out the other he could see how the ends of the ties nearly overhung the Fraser River a couple of hundred feet below.

For a minute or so all was silent except for the rumbling of the boilers, and then he heard Bateman and the roadmaster climb out on the mountain side of their cab and start to examine the bearing. Then without an instant’s warning, another slide slammed down, burying the rotary and covering the boiler of McKee’s locomotive. He and his fireman and Harry King, the section foreman from Jasper, jumped out on the river side of his cab and with great difficulty shoveled their way forward through the two or three feet of snow and reached the rotary.  They knew that Bateman and the roadmaster, crushed by fifteen feet of snow and rocks and jammed against the rotary, would in all probability be dead, but hoped to help Tommy Wharton, the brakeman, and Berry, the fireman.

When after a struggle they reached the forward cab, they found that its roof had been smashed in and had pinned Wharton under it. Although his leg was broken, he was still alive. Of Berry the fireman there was no trace. Wharton concluded that the impact had thrown him out of the cab and had probably catapulted him down to the river, but in the dark they could see no sign of him.  It took them an hour, working feverishly, to free Wharton and doing so entailed several trips back along the river side of the track to get extra bars and jacks, and each time they floundered in snow well above their knees. Finally they carried the disabled brakeman back to McKee’s cab and started shoveling snow over the bank. In a few minutes Harry King’s shovel touched Berry, who had fallen on the end of the ties and had been buried under the snow and rocks over which the other men had tramped back and forth. When they uncovered him he raised his arms toward them, groaned once, and died.

“ If we’d only a known,” said McKee, his voice breaking as he recalled the scene stamped on his memory half a century ago, “ if we’d only a known as we tramped back and forth over Berry’s face—if we’d only a known we could have dug him out and saved him. Three good men were killed in that slide.”
As with voyageurs, so with the train crews, death might lurk around any corner.

But silk trains and snowslides and an abandoned railway grade, are years ahead of this story. Other men, venturesome as voyageurs and intrepid as the men of the running trades, continued to take up the challenge of the lofty peaks of the Yellowhead Pass.