Stories of West Side

Stories from the West Side

Written and experinced by Hart Corbett

On June 10, 1959, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I were following a train of empties from Tuolumne up to Camp 8. The engine was no. 9 but I never knew who the engineer was; it was NOT Shorty Maddox. The consist behind the engine was one of the reefers, a number of skeleton cars and one of the unique WSL cabooses.

There were no paved roads beyond Tuolumne then. The old one lane dirt road from below River Bridge up to the Basin and Camp 8 went straight up the hill, crossing the railroad once about a third of the way up that hill. [The present paved road loops way around to the right on a much more gentle grade]. I parked my car (a 1954 Ford Victoria with automatic transmission) just up hill from the grade crossing and set up my 8mm movie camera on a tripod in order to catch no. 9 and its train coming up from River Bridge.

The train came on and suddenly stopped just before the grade crossing where I was standing. It's surprising how quickly an upgrade Shay can stop with an empty train! It seemed like only a 100 feet or less.

What I hadn't seen around the slight curve up grade from the grade crossing was a track crew with one of WSL's model T speeders with a trailer attached. The crew was splicing in a section of rail where the left hand rail had pulled apart at a joint. They were installing a "dutchman", as they called it. This "dutchman" was a short piece of rail, shorter than an ordinary rail joiner. The crew had a hacksaw with a very deep frame so as to be able to cut right through a rail. It was double handled so two men could operate it simultaneously and the short piece of rail was being cut to length (even shorter).

This sort of thing was common on any of the grades of the West Side. They used no tie plates. When a loaded downhill train applied its brakes, the rails tended to slide downhill over the ties, often moving the ties too. After a time, the rails would break somewhere on the grade. At or near the bottom of a grade, the West Side had what I've always called "frogless switches" with the switch points pointing up hill and spiked against the insides of the running rails. As the rails slid down hill when a train braked, the excess rail would slide against these points and move away from the ties into the ditches. The track crews came along regularly, cut off the excess rail and spliced it back in somewhere up the grade where either the rails had broken or the gauge had been narrowed on a curve. WSLCo1.JPG (10499 bytes)

One of these "frogless switches" still exists about 100 feet to the east of the highway grade crossing on the line to the woods at Tuolumne.

Anyway, the engine crew on no. 9 had seen this track crew while I had not. The crew's job was about half done, so the engineer, Bert Bergstrom, climbed down from the cab and he and I began to talk. Over his shoulder, in the cab, I saw a rack of small white flags and I asked him what they were for. It seems Bert made them himself out of bent coat hangers and pieces of tin cans. The coat hangers were bent in such a way so that it looked like a triangular "pennant" was on one side at the top. He then cut tin can material to the shape of the "pennant", soldered it in the triangular opening and painted the whole thing white.

Bert had about a dozen or 15 of these flags on the rack in his cab. The engineer explained that as the train was going along (particularly on the upgrade trip to the woods), he would look down at the ties as the engine passed over them. If he saw a bad tie (perhaps giving too much under the weight of the engine), he would climb down from the cab with one of those flags, stick it into the ground next to the ties or into the tie itself and then climb back into the cab. He did all this without stopping or slowing the train! He had to trot a little to catch up with his engine! Gives you an idea of just how slowly those West Side trains ran! Most modelers run their Shays far too fast for prototypical operation.

End of story.

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