Q: How long did it take you to get coal and water on your rotaries?
A: Oh, I should judge we were there three or four hours.
Q: How long would it ordinarily take, in good weather conditions?
A: Well, two engines and the two rotaries, coal and water, would probably take fifteen or twenty minutes.
—M. O. White, rotary conductor
Thursday, February 24, 1910
Wellington
After Midnight
It would be, O’Neill knew, another sleepless night. Wednesday evening had already bled seamlessly into Thursday morning, and still no trains were moving on the Cascade line. In the small office of the Wellington station, O’Neill had been keeping each of his three telegraphers furiously busy through a long eight-hour “trick,” or shift. One by one they had succeeded each other at the key—William Flannery, a transplanted Ohioan, was on duty from 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 in the afternoon; Basil Sherlock, the small, officious second-trick man, worked from 4:00 P.M. to midnight; and the third operator, an unassuming young man named W. V Avery, was now manning the graveyard shift. Known to his colleagues as “Mississippi,” Avery was a southerner by birth, with no previous experience in wintertime mountain railroading, and he was illprepared for the operational chaos triggered by a northern Cascades snowstorm. Like many railroad telegraphers of the day, he was a highly itinerant character, never spending very long at any one job, and he was utterly new to the Cascade Division. As luck would have it, he had started at Wellington just three days earlier—at midnight on February 21, four hours before the current storm had begun.
Through the shifts of all three of these telegraphers, O’Neill himself had doggedly remained on duty, stopping only occasionally for an hour’s nap or a quick meal prepared by his steward in the A-16. Short breaks were all that O’Neill felt he could allow himself Conditions had become so bad that tasks normally requiring a few minutes to accomplish were now taking several hours. The crew of the double rotary, for instance—the one that Ned Topping had watched being assembled in the Cascade Tunnel yard—had spent well over three hours just getting the plows and their engines filled up at the Wellington water tank. Homer Purcell’s single rotary had also taken far longer than expected to work through the slide at Snow-shed 3.3. Many of the extra gang workers, citing fatigue, had simply refused to work, leaving the task of shoveling the snow down to a depth of thirteen feet—the maximum depth the rotaries could handle—to the train crews themselves. As a result, night had already fallen by the time Purcell had broken through the slide and could continue plowing west.
The fact that the coal supply was dwindling only compounded these difficulties. Wellington was not a regular coaling station for through trains, which typically took on their fuel at Leavenworth at the eastern edge of the mountains and at Skykomish in the west. O’Neill tried to have an ample emergency reserve on the mountain to keep his rotaries well supplied during heavy snowstorms, but something had gone wrong this week. Perhaps as a result of the ongoing switchmen’s strike, a scheduled delivery of four extra cars of coal had somehow been bungled at Leavenworth. So although O’Neill had started the storm with 140 tons at Wellington—ample under normal winter conditions—this was now proving to be inadequate. With the rotaries consuming enormous quantities of fuel in their round-the-clock labors, stores were rapidly running out. On Wednesday afternoon, O’Neill had fired off an angry telegram to G. W. Turner, the chief dispatcher at Everett: “WILL BE OUT OF COAL HERE TOMORROW, WHEN WILL YOU HAVE SUPPLY DELIVERED?” But with no regular trains moving, there was little Turner could do. Without a replenished coal supply at Wellington, the rotaries would soon have to start recoaling all the way down at Skykomish, adding yet another kink to the smooth operation of the superintendent’s mountain line.
At least O’Neill knew that the GN was not alone in this sea of troubles; the entire northwestern tier of the country was now reeling under the onslaught of this storm. Certainly every railroad with a line through the Cascades was having enormous difficulties. The Milwaukee Road (a.k.a. the Chicago, Milwaukee, and Puget Sound) had shut down its Cascade operations entirely, and the Northern Pacific had several passenger trains stalled at its own tunnel at Stampede Pass. A theater company on one blockaded NP train had even taken the long delay as an opportunity to put on a show, commandeering an empty baggage car for a performance of The Merchant of Venice.
O’Neill, however, had only tobacco to distract him, and he was almost certainly partaking copiously of his trademark small cigars. In February 1910—thanks to the tide of fastidious progressivism that was then sweeping the country—cigarettes were prohibited in the state of Washington; it was illegal not only to manufacture or sell them but even to possess them. Cigars, on the other hand, were still perfectly legal, due in large part to the fact that one of the anti-cigarette bill’s original sponsors—State Senator Orville Tucker of Seattle—was an avid cigar smoker. (The story goes that Tucker even set fire to his Olympia hotel room while discussing the legislation with colleagues. “Senator Tucker,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blithely reported, “had been too enthusiastic wrestling with a refractory match.”)
But even cigars in heavy doses could provide O’Neill with only limited consolation. He had, all told, six trains in distress on his Cascade line, not to mention numerous others delayed elsewhere in the division—and all of them were losing time and money with every idle hour.
Finally, at about 2:00 A.M. on Thursday, some good news arrived: Homer Purcell’s rotary, incommunicado for most of the night, finally chugged into the Wellington yard. Rimed with ice and windblown snow, the battered-looking plow bore mute testimony to Purcell’s own rough night. After finally bucking westward through the slide at Snowshed 3.3 late on Wednesday, he had met trainmaster Arthur Blackburn’s rotary—the X801—which had been working eastward up the line from Scenic. The two plows had proceeded to a small station on the mountain called Alvin, where they had combined into a double rotary and started back toward Wellington. Even that trip of less than four miles had turned into a slog, but they had finally reached Wellington after five hard hours, clearing the tracks as they went.
To O’Neill, the meaning of this breakthrough was clear: The line west was open again. Unless another slide had come down sometime in the past few hours, those two trains stuck at Cascade Tunnel Station now had their escape route off the mountain.
The superintendent did not hesitate. Although Purcell, Blackburn, and the rest of the crew of the double had not slept in well over a day, he ordered the disheveled trainmen to turn right back again and make another plowing run down to Scenic to keep the line clear. Then he contacted the operator at Cascade Tunnel Station, instructing him to prepare the Fast Mail and the Seattle Express for action.
Shortly thereafter, the snow that had been falling relentlessly for the past forty-eight hours started to let up. It seemed possible to O’Neill that the storm might be lifting at last. That would have made it a relatively long storm by Cascades standards, but not an unprecedented one. So now, with two double rotaries at his disposal and another single rotary—the X808—almost ready to head toward the mountains from the repair shop in Everett, O’Neill even allowed himself a bit of optimism. In a message relayed by telegram up and down the line, he predicted that the Cascade Division would be open for operation again by 6:00 A.M. Thursday. With no new snow to complicate plowing efforts, the opening of the line should proceed easily now. And if the storm was truly past, he might even be able to get back to Everett to spend the weekend with Berenice and the baby.
It was to be a premature declaration of victory. Though word of O’Neill’s prediction would percolate down to the Seattle papers (“O’Neill has won the fight of his life,” the Post-Intelligencer would proclaim on Thursday’s front page), the battle was still far from over. At about 4:30 A.M.—even before Blackburn and Purcell had recoaled their double rotary—the storm roared back with all of its previous intensity. Tangled in snowdrifts at the water tank, the plow did not start heading west again until well after 6:00, and even then the going was not easy.
“If anything, it is snowing harder than it was last P.M.,” O’Neill reported, with obvious chagrin, in an 8 A.M. telegram to headquarters. “Strong northwest wind and drifting very badly. … All of our extra gang men are tired out and we are unable to get them to work. … It is drifting so bad that track drifts in immediately after rotary passes over.”
As difficult as conditions might be, however, the line was still open as far as anyone knew, and O’Neill was determined to seize the opportunity to get those two trains off the mountain. To make sure that nothing else went awry, he decided to oversee the job of digging them out himself. This would at least give him a reason to get away from that smoke-filled telegraph office and out into the weather. Leaving the grateful telegrapher to his own devices, O’Neill joined assistant trainmaster William Harrington—his “Snow King”—on the other double rotary. Together they made ready to head east to Cascade Tunnel Station, where they would begin the process of extracting those trains from the Cascade cement.
Thursday 10:40 A.M.—This makes 30 hours here in this spot. It’s still snowing hard. … Conductor this morning says snow over there [at Wellington] is 20 ft deep and slides back as fast as taken away. I’d give $10.00 to have the Kodak so’s to bring back to you all my present surroundings.
—Ned Topping
Midmorning Thursday
The passengers awoke on Thursday morning to a scene dishearteningly similar to the one that had presented itself twenty-four hours earlier. Still the snow was coming down; still the two trains sat idle at Cascade Tunnel Station. The character of the snowfall itself, however, had changed overnight. “The flakes became larger and heavier,” Lewis Jesseph would later report, “but did not fall so thick and fast.” The result was better visibility. As the passengers trudged up to the beanery for another breakfast, they could finally see far enough to glimpse the mountain peaks all around them. Faced with those steep walls of white punctuated only by the skeletal remains of burned-off firs and pines, they realized—many for the first time—how isolated and remote they really were.
There probably wasn’t much overt contact at the beanery between the well-dressed passengers and the unkempt and overtired railroaders—one imagines them sitting uncomfortably at opposite ends of the room, sneaking glances at each other through the rising steam of their coffee cups—but word was soon spreading through the dining hall that the food supply was running low. With the storm preventing delivery of any new provisions, chef Elerker’s limited stores were proving inadequate to the task of feeding so many extra mouths. Some said that if the trains were to remain at Cascade Tunnel much longer, food would have to be rationed.
When Mrs. Covington heard this rumor back on the Winnipeg, she confided her growing concern to her diary. “Thursday 24th, 10 A.M.,” she wrote. “They say it has snowed 13 ft in 11 hours. … The mts. loom up a thousand feet or thousands. … They keep saying the provisions are getting low and they can’t get water for the train.”
Right beside the tracks, visible through Mrs. Covington’s frost-rimed window, some workers were trying to clear snow from the roof of the station roundhouse. The old woman drew a small picture of the scene in her diary. The men were digging from the top of the roof down to the eaves, creating trenches whose walls towered several feet above their heads. Under different circumstances, the sight of those dwarfed figures battling feebly against the snow might have been amusing to her. But Mrs. Covington was in no state of mind to be amused. Though her diary indicates that she was well cared for, she confessed to feeling anxious and alone, particularly after news spread through the train that a snowslide somewhere on the eastern slope had taken out the telegraph line. The day before, she’d been able to send a wire to her son Melmoth telling him she was safe. Now, however, she felt adrift, without direct connection to the husband, seven children, and twenty-two grandchildren who were her life.
“The tel. wires are down,” she wrote in her diary—adding, with perhaps a touch of melodrama: “No communication with the world.”
Most of Mrs. Covington’s fellow passengers were taking the situation with somewhat more equanimity. Along about midmorning, lawyers Jesseph and Merritt, retreating to the observation car, blandly took note of the fact that their supreme court case was being called in Olympia even as they sat here, 170 miles away. (Contrary to Jesseph’s expectations, the court ultimately did go forward with the hearing; the justices ended up deciding the case based solely on the written record—in Merritt’s favor.) Two boys—probably the eighteen-year-olds Milton Horn and Frank Ritter—entertained themselves by stepping out to the station platform to play their horns in the snow. Ned Topping was even trying to use the unexpected spare hours to get some work done, hatching new strategies for the family’s barn-door business: “Say father,” he wrote in his letter home, “Don’t you think it would be a good scheme to have the Steel Co. cut us up some steel—that is, shear it to lengths & widths ready for the machine in case we get the new machines before the shear? This would save some time and in order to have it sheared correctly, one of the boys or myself could go direct to the mill and superintend the shearing.”
Meanwhile, three-year-old Thelma Davis was busy charming everyone aboard. Her father, George, a small, half-Iroquois man who worked as a streetcar motorman, was taking her to see her mother in Seattle, and the child had quickly become the pet of the train. With her thick, dark, shoulder-length hair and plump, pretty features, she was apparently finding no shortage of surrogate mothers on the train—to the relief of her father, who doubtless had long ago run out of ideas to entertain her.
Others on the Express were also making a social event of the delay. John Rogers, a Seattle real estate man, had been inspecting mining properties in central Washington with his lawyer, former judge James McNeny. Now the two were taking it upon themselves to spread a little goodwill through the train. “We visited from coach to coach,” Rogers would later recall. “[We] joked with the sick, and did our best to keep everybody reassured. Conductor Pettit,” he added, “was foremost in everything of that sort.”
Joe Pettit, though not out laboring in the wind-whipped snow like most of the other railroaders, was certainly performing a job just as difficult—dealing with fifty-five impatient and underoccupied passengers. Being the father of five young children, he was undoubtedly well schooled in patience and diplomacy. Even so, he can’t have had an easy time of it keeping everyone satisfied.
And there were some among the passengers whose situation made Pettit’s job especially delicate. John Gray, for instance, with his broken leg in a heavy cast, could not even be moved from his berth. Ada Lemman, a slender, thirty-nine-year-old woman suffering from an unspecified nervous condition, was an even more ticklish problem; accompanied by her attorney husband, Edgar, she was now on her way to a hospital in Port Townsend for treatment, and by popular report she was more than a handful to deal with, always on the edge of hysteria.
Perhaps worst off was sixty-year-old J. R. Vail, a sheepherder from Trinidad, Washington, afflicted with a swollen carbuncle on his neck. Little information survives about his illness, but the fact that he was being transported by a professional caregiver—Catherine O’Reilly, a young nurse from the Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane—hints that the infection was already a serious condition, and one that, in this age before antibiotics, could very easily become much worse.
For the majority of Pettit’s other charges, the primary ailment to be endured at this point was cabin fever. “It’s awful being held up like this,” Ned Topping wrote. “Can’t get off the train for exercise on account of snow and storm.” Letting ill temper get the better of him, he even began complaining about the beanery again: “Have had 4 meals now at the camp. A dirty grease hole—oilcloth on tables and half-wiped dishes. Eat alongside of the scum of the earth.”
Toward late afternoon on Thursday, the spirits of Topping and everyone else aboard got a lift when they began to see signs of renewed activity in the Cascade Tunnel yard. The men he’d called “the scum of the earth” were now out in the storm beside the trains, digging away the snow and ice that had accumulated around each car. The double rotary from yesterday was also back, cleaning up the tracks between the trains and the tunnel.
“It’s now about 5:00 P.M.,” Topping wrote as the afternoon light began to falter. “Snow is nearly stopped and clearing up some. Engines are steaming up & this gives a faint hope.”
That faint hope was soon fulfilled. Before long, the good news was spreading like a warm breeze through both the Seattle Express and the Fast Mail. The trains, after the better part of two days, were finally going to proceed west.
Look for Nos 25 + 27 to leave Tunnel about 5 P.M. Rotaries digging them out now
—J. H. O’Neill,
telegram to E. L. Brown,
Great Northern Railway, St. Paul
Cascade Tunnel Station
Late Thursday Afternoon
Anyone looking for an explanation of James H. O’Neill’s popularity among his men need only consider his actions on the stormy Thursday afternoon of February 24. As superintendent, O’Neill was the highest-ranking official on the entire Cascade Division—the rough equivalent of, say, a major general in the army of the Great Northern Railway. Yet here he was, sleepless and badly shaven after two full days on duty, digging snowdrifts from the wheel trucks of a train coach. Having come over to Cascade on the rotary with Harrington and a gang of laborers, O’Neill had quickly checked in with the station operator, issued his instructions, and then grabbed a shovel to help the gangmen dig.
This wasn’t merely a gesture calculated for show. According to more than one report, when O’Neill cleared a frozen switch or crawled under a disabled rotary to lend a hand on the bridge jack, he really did the job. As someone who had worked his way up from the very lowest positions in railway service, he was familiar with nearly every dirty task there was to do on a steam railroad, and he knew how to get cooperation from even the lowest-paid extra gangmen, typically foreigners with whom he didn’t even share a language. “In two minutes,” a colleague once said of him, “he can have a … gang of foreigners doing team work and moving together like oiled machinery.”
It was a scene reminiscent of one involving O’Neill’s illustrious boss, James J. Hill. According to a famous story, the Empire Builder once grew impatient when his train became immobilized in a Dakota blizzard. Seeing the snow shovelers outside his window start to flag, he decided to take matters in hand. As his biographer Stuart Holbrook tells the story: “President Hill of the railroad came out to snatch the shovel from one man and send that bemused working stiff into the president’s private car for hot coffee, while he himself shoveled snow as though driven by steam. One after the other, the gandy-dancers were spelled off and drank fine java in unaccustomed elegance while the Great Northern’s creator and boss wielded a shovel. That was Jim Hill for you.”
That was also Jim O’Neill for you, and it was probably this prodigious work ethic that had first attracted the Empire Builder’s attention. Later profiles of O’Neill depict him as a favorite of Hill’s as far back as his Montana days, when the latter allegedly chose the young conductor to oversee his train whenever business took him to the western divisions. Hill may have been attracted by O’Neill’s similar background (both men were transplanted Canadians with humble beginnings and little formal education), but it was more likely O’Neill’s hardworking competence that truly endeared him to the old man. “He does not sit in his private car writing and directing the work,” a Great Northern colleague once said of the superintendent. “He is ‘on the job’ all the time. He sets the pace for his men, works with them, and accomplishes results.”
Despite O’Neill’s energetic shoveling efforts with the gangmen, however, the task of moving the two trains at Cascade Tunnel Station ended up being anything but simple. Twice during the process the lead rotary of the double was thrown off center, a problem requiring precious time to correct. Even after the trains had been freed of snow, the electric locomotives were still unable to budge them from the passing track. O’Neill and his men were eventually forced to uncouple the individual cars of each train and dislodge them one by one, reassembling them on the track in front of the tunnel portal.
It was a slow, almost unfathomably cumbersome chore. And before it was finished, a snowslide somewhere between the tunnel and its hydroelectric plant in Tumwater Canyon took out the power and communication lines to the east. The job of pulling out the trains therefore had to be finished by the steam locomotives, which would then have to carry them through the unventilated tunnel. The only bright spot in the situation was that the trains would be moving downgrade as they traveled to Wellington. With gravity providing most of the tractive effort, the steam locomotives could “drift” through the tunnel, throttles barely open, making any danger of asphyxiation remote.
Toward evening—with the job of moving the trains now under control—O’Neill finished up at Cascade Tunnel Station and hopped a ride on the rotary west through the tunnel. It was growing late, and he needed to get back to a working telegraph key to report to his superiors in St. Paul.
But there was yet another snag awaiting him at Wellington. The second double rotary—the one that was supposed to have plowed the tracks down to Scenic by now—was instead back at Wellington, sitting idle in the snow. Hard as it was to believe, conductor Purcell and his crew had encountered another snowslide on the line west—near Snowshed 3.3 again, at precisely the same point where the first major slide had come down twenty-four hours earlier. Worse, while attempting to buck through it, the lead plow of the double, the X807, had swallowed a fallen tree stump embedded in the snow. The stump had ravaged the bowels of the plow and broken its hoist mechanism, causing the plow to list hard to one side. Although Purcell and his men had effected a makeshift repair of the machine, it was all but useless for heavy-duty work.
Even a man as stoic as James O’Neill must now have been beyond frustration. With the westward line blocked yet again, those two trains would not be able to continue down the mountain for at least several more hours. Nor could they be held back at Cascade; the dwindling food supply at the beanery had to be conserved for the use of the workers there. So O’Neill decided to put the trains at Wellington, at least for the moment. West of the Wellington station were several passing tracks where both trains could wait until the line was clear again. The passengers could then eat their supper at Bailets Hotel, a small railroaders’ hostelry not far away. The proprietor, W. R. Bailets, reportedly had plenty of food on hand, and would welcome the extra business.
Fortunately, there was at least one encouraging development concerning rotary snowplow X808, the fifth of the division’s rotaries. Under the direction of the division’s master mechanic, J. J. Dowling, it had now reached Scenic, clearing the line from the coast and allowing several eastbound trains stranded since early Wednesday at Skykomish and Scenic to return to Seattle. Dowling’s rotary had also picked up two cars of coal at Skykomish and was pulling them up the west slope. If O’Neill’s rotary crews could somehow limit their consumption of coal, supplementing the supply in the coal chute with coal from various locomotives not in current use, they might just be able to scrape by until Dowling’s two carfuls arrived. Until that time, O’Neill would put disabled rotary X807 on the coal-chute track alongside his own business car, where the rotary’s coal supply could be plundered if necessary.
That still left the matter of clearing up this new slide at Snowshed 3.3, and the rotary crews, many of which had been on duty for two days straight, desperately needed a break. Rather than leave the plows idle while their operators slept, O’Neill decided to supplement their crews with the relatively well-rested men from the electric motors. He and Blackburn would take the double rotary west with these extra men to attack the slide at Snowshed 3.3 overnight. Harrington would meanwhile take the remaining single rotary—the X801—back through the tunnel to deal with the slide that had taken down the power lines on the east slope.
With the process of moving the trains to Wellington well under way, the superintendent and trainmaster Blackburn boarded the double rotary and began to head west toward Windy Point. Weary as he was, Jim O’Neill seemed determined not to rest until his division was back in working order.
24th of Feb. at night. They are moving us through the Tunnel to a little hamlet called Wellington.
—Sarah Jane Covington
Wellington
Thursday Evening
At approximately 7:45 P.M. Great Northern Railway train No. 25 emerged from the western portal of the Cascade Tunnel into the muffled silence of the Wellington yard. Night had already set in, and with the electricity out, the few lights visible in the tiny, snowbound settlement were dim and irregular, the buildings lit only by gas lamps and flickering lanterns. As the train glided past the embattled-looking station, the passengers could see, standing on the slope behind it, a large wooden building with the words HOTEL BAILETS painted in block letters across its facade. It was here, according to conductor Pettit, that they would go to get their supper—a welcome piece of news. After the beanery, Bailets’s dining room was bound to seem like Delmonico’s.
Still moving, No. 25 was shunted off the main line onto one of the sidings that paralleled it for some distance beyond the station. Here the train shuddered to a stop. Happy to have made even this small advance—at the very least they were now “over the hump,” on the westward side of the summit ridge—the passengers peered through the train windows at their new surroundings. To the right of the cars, standing on the various side tracks of the Wellington lower yard, were some of the casualties of the railroad’s ongoing fight against the storm: the disabled rotary X807, an extra steam engine, and three of the four powerful GE electric motors, now paralyzed by the downing of the power lines. At the very end of the spur track, opposite a small sand house and a tall wooden coal chute, sat an elegant-looking business car: the A-16, the private car of superintendent O’Neill, nearly invisible under mounds of snow.
The exact nature of their new position would not be evident to most of the passengers until daybreak, but the passing track on which they had been placed was located on a fifty-foot-wide ledge that had been gouged out of the mountainside during construction of the line. Above the ledge was a steep, sparsely timbered slope running two thousand feet straight up to the top of Windy Mountain. Below, just beyond a second, still-unoccupied passing track to their left, was the continuation of the slope—a sharp drop down to frozen Tye Creek. The train, in other words, was perched on a narrow shelf, with a steep ravine below it and acres of heavy wet snow on a mountainside above it.
After wrapping themselves in coats and hats against the cold, the passengers disembarked and headed toward the hotel. Henry White, Ned Topping, and the others walked back along the newly cleared tracks, filing between the high snowbanks as if through stark white corridors. The snow was falling copiously but gently now; the fierce winds had died down to a gentle breeze. As they passed the Wellington depot, Topping took note of the snow gauge affixed to the back of the building. It registered seventeen feet of snow on the level, with more still accumulating.
Once seated at their tables in the pleasant, high-ceilinged dining room at Bailets—amid the lace curtains, potted plants, and hanging chromolithographs of various specimens of fish and game—the passengers tried to learn whatever they could about the progress of the snowplows. No one at Bailets, though, could say with any certainty how long the trains would be delayed at Wellington. Conductor Pettit, ever optimistic, assured them that the wait would be brief, especially now that the storm seemed to be tapering off, but it’s doubtful that anyone really believed him. The drifts of snow at Wellington were even more imposing than those they’d all been staring at for two days at Cascade Tunnel Station. With the snow still falling, the passengers had to be wondering if it would be yet another day—or even two—before they got out of that icy wilderness and down to the safety of the coast.
After dinner, several of the passengers decided to bundle up and have a look around the storm-battered town. To their surprise, it proved to be even smaller than its counterpart at the other end of the tunnel. Surrounded by roadless mountains, Wellington had no proper streets—just walkways, some of them wooden, connecting the various buildings. Instead, the town’s main street seemed to be the railroad line itself. Virtually every major structure was arranged on or near it, tracing the inside arc of the broadly curving tracks as they ran along the edge of Windy Mountain.
The entire settlement, in fact, turned out to be little more than what the passengers had seen from the windows of their moving train. Just outside the tunnel portal was the upper rail yard—essentially three spur tracks built on an artificial flat created from tunnel debris. A large enginemen’s bunkhouse stood here, and on the banks of a small creek beyond were a few sorry-looking shanties and small houses. West of the creek was the depot, the section house, and the roadmaster’s office. And on the slope behind were two privately operated businesses, the Bailets Hotel (where they had eaten supper) and a seedy-looking tavern called Fogg Brothers Restaurant.
This, in short, was “downtown” Wellington. A few other structures lay west of the depot—the coal chute, sand house, and water tank; a new shed for the four GE electric locomotives; the parallel sidings where the Seattle Express stood—but aside from these and a few other assorted structures, there was nothing else. From the western switch of the passing tracks, the main line simply ran under a short wooden snowshed and continued on down the mountain toward Windy Point. The next settlement of any size was Scenic Hot Springs, a long ten miles down the twisted right-of-way.
“8:00 P.M. Thursday,” Ned Topping wrote, continuing his letter back on the train. “Well, we’ve pulled through the 3–mile tunnel and are on the west side of the Cascades. Don’t know whether we will go on or not. Just talked to Porter—poor fellow has a sick baby & is anxious to get home. Other babies I have mentioned have been good, but it’s tough to see them held up this way. Am going to turn in soon.”
Many others on the train were also retiring early, apparently hoping that sleep would make the hours of waiting pass more quickly. Those who stayed up a little longer would have seen the Fast Mail arriving from Cascade Tunnel at about 10:15. This much shorter train—carrying A. B. Hensel and the other mail clerks—was held at the station for a short time. Then it proceeded west to the second passing track, alongside the Seattle Express, right on the edge of the drop to Tye Creek below.
It was to be the last tranquil evening for the seventy-odd people aboard the two trains. By morning, news would arrive that would change the complexion of their collective predicament, turning what until then had been an inconvenient delay into something far more ominous and frightening. For now, though, they could all bed down with relative peace of mind. Progress seemed imminent: The storm appeared to be passing; the rotaries would be working through the night to clear the line. Only a few people aboard would still have been awake when, toward 3:00 A.M., the wind started picking up again, rocking the Pullmans gently, sweeping up the snow and depositing it in ever deeper drifts on that brooding, sparsely timbered slope above the trains.