I read a local tale somewhere about a MILW train that headed to Faith SD back in the 1930s and it got stuck in a great blizzard. The drifts were 20 ft. high, and the temp dropped down colder than forty below It was a mixed train with passenger car. When crew realized it was going to be days before they were rescued, they put out the fire and drained the engine to conserve coal for use in the passenger car stove. Without that, they would certainly have all died. Faith, SD is in the northwest quarter of the state and has always been very barren and desolate shortgrass prairie. When I go through there in winter, I am always well prepared! 
Kent in SD
Hey, I dug up the story! Here it is, hope it's not too long:
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NAME OF STORY....THE FEATHERBEDDERS ------ BY PAUL BYINGTON
THERE was nothing unusual about a call to go out to Faith, except
that the weather on this trip was so piercingly cold. It was Saturday,
which meant that we would have to spend our Sunday layover in Faith.
The trip going out was not unusual either, except that wherever snow
had drifted over the rails or filled in the cuts for a foot or so in
depth, it was so solid that plowing it out was more like trying to
break out solid ice.
Anyway, we arrived at Faith at 8:30 P.M. with the temperature 51 or
52 degrees below zero, and the snow drifting badly. I'll always
recall how good that big T-bone steak tasted when we had finally got
thawed out and had ordered our dinner.
Next morning the weather was just as sour, and no one ventured
outdoors except of necessity, and then they hurried as fast as
possible over the snow-packed streets. As for us "rails," we just sat
in the lobby of the .West Hotel with our feet cocked up on the heat
register to keep warm.
The West Hotel was built in the old "Gay Nineties" style. Just a two-
story frame building with the typical Old West front, and a porch the
same as you will see in movies, or on the TV screen of today. It had
four or five posts, and one of those posts, directly out from where
we sat, had one of those two-foot-long ther mometers on it. And on
that Sunday, the warmest it showed was forty degrees below zero, and
it was still windy.
Here's something that Mr. "Believe- It-Or-Not" Ripley put in his�
feature. He said, "On February, 16, 1936, the official temperature at
McIntosh, South Dakota, was fifty-nine degrees below zero-the coldest
ever recorded in the United States except at exceedingly high
altitudes." (McIntosh, South Dakota, is sixty miles north of Faith.)
ON Monday morning we were called for "Number 206, on time (8 A.M.),"
so we rolled out, had our breakfast, picked up the grips and went to work.
Boy-oh-boy! she was cold. Fifty-three below zero again, and the snow
still scudding along. Ground blizzards, they call them now. We got
our old Number 1027 and began to make up our train for the trip back to
Mobridge.
It was pretty tough snowplowing from Faith to Eagle Butte, a distance
of thirty eight miles. The snow was so hard frozen, and so full of
dirt and tumbleweeds from off the plowed fields that it did not look
like snow, and came out in blocks. A horse could have walked on those
drifts and hardly left a hoof mark.
At Eagle Butte we coaled up our engine to its maximum capacity, set
out all our cars except the combination mail and express (always
referred to as the "M.E." car), and kept only the � one day-coach.
We had� a fine Rogers Ballast snowplow ahead �of our engine and we
were well equipped to plow our way home, or so we thought!
It was still fifty-three degrees below zero, and the wind had
increased to a sixty or seventy-mile-an-hour gale. Again it was
snowing.
We all went over to a small restaurant to eat, then back to our
train, and by this time we were in the granddaddy of all Dakota
blizzards.
The snow was so dense that visibility�was not over fifty feet. The
wind was literally screaming, and it was still holding to that
fifty-three degrees below zero.
Such a storm cannot be adequately described in words. If you have
never faced a wind that cold, or of such velocity, I won't urge you
to try it or not just for kicks, as the young folks say. In such
weather a person can freeze the flesh on nose, lips and cheeks almost
solid in five or ten minutes.
Well, we were ready to leave Eagle Butte when Ed Ogden, our
conductor, came over with our orders in his hand and said, "Paul, the
chief dispatcher wants your opinion as to whether you think you can
make it through or not;"
"Ed," I said, "you tell the chief dispatcher that I have no way of
knowing whether we will make it or not, since this storm is the
worst that I have ever seen. I will put it in his lap. If he
says, 'Go,' we will go."
Ogden went back into the depot, and had the dispatcher tell the
chief dispatcher what I had said.
In about five minutes the conductor came struggling out into the
storm and, when close enough to be seen, gave us the big "Go" sign-
and right there began the roughest piece of railroading that I ever made
in all my fifty-two years of locomotive service. Believe me, I have seen
many a hard trip, but no one� of them could hold a candle to this one.
The track east from Eagle Butte is built right on top of the
prairie, so to speak. When the old Milwaukee Road built a branch line
back in 1910, they didn't believe in high grades or trestles, but just built
on the lay of the ground. If they came to a hill they built right
over it, or if a cut was to be made, they cut just as little as
possible. So our railroad was a mess of curves, short, shallow cuts,
and up hill and down dale. Perhaps there are worse branch lines than
the one to Faith but they must be rather few.
We had gone about one-and-a-half miles out of Eagle Butte, when
whamo! we ran into our first snowbank. It was like hitting solid ice.
I knew right then what we were in for, but you can't back up when the
rails are ice-covered, you'll go on the ground. So we went at it full
head. Then there was a bigger, deeper bank that smashed in our front
cab windows, completely covering us with big blocks of icy snow, and
all the while the storm was growing in inensity and wind velocity.
We were completely blinded by snow, ice and the steam that rose
when snow struck the fire box and boiler.
It is not possible to explain to a person, who hasn't had the
experience, what our locomotive was like while plowing snow. The
engine crew was actually running blind. They saw nothing either
inside or outside the engine cab because of snow and steam.
How my fireman ever got coal from the tender into the firebox while
we were plowing is a mystery. With the door open one could see
just a dim ring of light in the steam. When we'd strike a big solid
bank at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour, it felt as though you had
run into a rock wall.
At times the engine men were knocked against the boiler head, or
piled in a heap under snow that came through the broken front
windows, or in the gangway. We'd slam blind into a cut full of ice-
hard snow, but somehow kept moving although we almost came
to a dead stop long before we finally came to rest.
After we had come through a drift nearly 700 yards long and up to 15
or 16 feet deep, we stalled. The snowplow had come through the drift
and was just poking out the far end. Well, we were into snow so deep
we couldn't get out through the gangway, so we went into the cab and
scrambled out onto the big drift
Feeling our way along, back over the coach next to the engine, we
found that the the snow was two or three feet higher than the roof of
the coach, so we dug down between the engine and car, uncoupled the
coach and began to get our engine on out of the drift which was only
about fifty feet more.
That done, we tried to shovel our way back to the coaches so we could
couple on and bring them out one at a time. It was just "no dice."
The wind's velocity was seventy-five miles per hour, the temperature
still fifty three degrees below zero, and that sliding, blinding snow
would fill in faster than we could dig it out. It was just about like trying
to shovel a barrel of loose flour onto a ledge above your head.
Finding it impossible to get our coach and mail car out of the drift,
we felt we were doomed to stay there until the storm abated so that a
full-fledged snow bucking outfit could come and dig us out.
We walked up the track to Mossman stockyards, where there was a
two' by two' phone box up on a telegraph pole. We planned to contact the
chief dispatch er, give him our location, and report facts as they were.
I will never forget Conductor Ogden trying to crank that old phone,
and keep the receiver up to his ear. His ear froze rigid, and his
nose and cheek turned frosty white before he finished.
The chief dispatcher got all the data, but our conductor nearly froze
to death. Poor Ogden! He had been ill and had just got back from
some hot springs resort, so he wasn't fit to be out in such weather It
was too much for him.
After asking the dispatcher to block all traffic to that point, we.
started to back up to our train, about one-and-three- fourths miles
distant. We did all right shoveling through those plowed out drifts
with the back of our tender, until we got to a cut half-a-mile from
our train.
There we plowed the snow into a great mound and dragged it in on us
with our backing plow. We were unable to go ahead or back.
The storm got worse, if such a thing were possible. Anyway, we could
not see over fifteen feet in that frozen hell. It was up to us to
get fuel back to the two old potbellied stoves on the train to keep
the people from literally freezing to death. So we borrowed bags from
the mail car and filled them with coal, drag ging them back the half-
mile to the train.
It was about this time that someone found out that there was no
drinking water aboard, and no food either.
As passengers we had one middle-aged man, and a sick woman en
route to Rochester, Minnesota, with a nurse accompanying her.
The snow sifted in around the ventilator doors until it was four
inches deep all over the car seats and floor - except where the heat
from "Old Potbelly" kept a small patch thawed off. Everyone hugged
the stove which, as you may recall, was placed in a corner, usually
just opposite the toilet.
The old stoves were jacketed with sheet iron, and railroaders
gratefully ack nowledge the amount of heat they could put out. And I
will testify as to the amount of coal they could consume, as I
personally carried half of the coal during that ordeal.
Only the head brakeman and I were able to carry coal.
Rear brakeman Bill Moon, aged seventy-three, was too old to get out
in the storm. The conductor had become very ill and lay in the mail
car covered over With mail bags. Fireman Louie Macken had wrenched
his back when we were plowing snow. It was the head brakeman and me
for packing fuel.
About 10:30 P.M., we heard a racket on the road about a hundred yards
away. It was a state highway tractor pulling a cook shack such as
workmen used. They had recruited fifteen men to come out and get the
sick woman and the nurse. But no one had the gumption to think we
might be without food or water out there.
They took our passengers and made it back to Eagle Butte. It made us
a little more room but we were still hungry. We began to shovel snow into
the engine's tank to keep her alive, melting it with the steam line.
By this time it was around midnight of Monday, February 17. Between
us we kept our locomotive alive in her icy prison, and we went on
shoveling snow into her all day Tuesday and Tuesday night.
Finally, it was obvious that old 1027 was going to die anyway, so I
set about to drain and kill her engine on Wednesday morning.
The mail clerk helped me dig down along side of the cylinders and
take out the drain cocks, and all the gadgets that only a steam
engineer would recall. So we killed her.
Wednesday noon we still had got A nothing to put into our stomachs
except the dirty snow water that we melted in a fire bucket. I had a
severe headache from being hungry, and felt terribly sleepy and
tired. But that afternoon the wind let up a little and the snow quit.
The mail clerk said, "Say, Paul, I have my pistol along. Let's go see
if we can shoot a jackrabbit."
No luck that way, but both of us re called a little Russian farmer
who lived two and a half miles farther on, and we thought we'd go see
if he could sell us a little food. How well I remember that family!
Gaunt, hungry, poorly clothed, and all huddled about a small heater
trying to keep wann.
You recall that this was 1936, the worst of the Depression years.
There had been wind, drought and grasshoppers which had eaten
everything except the tumble weeds, and even some of them.
When we told the man about being up the track without food he just
said, "Well, we have but little food, and cannot get out of here to
drive to town (eighteen miles) to get any, and neither have we any
money to buy fuel, so we are burning the stock corral boards and some
cow chips to keep from freezing-but we will spare you a loaf of
bread, a little coffee and a chunk of frozen pork if that will help."
"You bet that would help," we told him, adding that he might like to
hitch up a team to his bobsled and go borrow a load of coal from the
dead, engine of ours.
Our friend must have hauled coal from our tender most of the night.
When I found that it was about stripped, I went out and asked him not
to take any more, as we might freeze in our coach before help could
come to us.
We put that pork to boil in the fire bucket, and couldn't wait
until it was done to eat it. Muddy snow water went into the coffee,
and we toasted the bread in a scoop shovel. We had no cooking
utensils whatever except the one tin cup and the coffee can. But
better food was never served than what we ate on that bitter cold
evening. Still fifty degrees below zero, it was taking quite a few bags
of coal to keep those two stoves going and Bill Moran and I did all the
packing of it.
About noon on February 20, a Diamond A cowpuncher, from their
base about five miles up, came riding into our little camp on a horse
white with frost. The cowboy had icicles around his eyes, and
whiskers like Santa Claus, but he had known that we were marooned,
and had brought a gunnysack of grub for us. On this date twenty-eight
years later, I can name every article of food in that bag.
There was coffee, two pounds, some bacon, beans, canned beef, frozen
eggs, corn, milk, bread, crackers, onions, cheese and hotcake flour
and us with no pan for frying them in. There was sugar and some salt.
We learned to fry eggs in the scoop, and to make coffee in a can.
We learned to make wooden forks and spoons, also how to use our-
jackknives. And did we have a banquet? You bet!
On Friday morning at about 5 A.M. a double-header snow-plowing outfit
came out to us and got hold of old 1027 and the rest of the equipment,
and dragged them onto a siding at Mossman, North Dakota.
They took us along west with them and we ate to our hearts' content.
We got a big sleep in bed on Friday, the 21st. Then on Saturday we
got to our homes in Mobridge. It had been quite a week. And by now it
had warmed up to thirty-five or forty degrees below zero.
The chief dispatcher called Ogden and me up on the carpet monday
morning he threatened to fire me for having gone out in such a storm
and getting into such a mess.
The officials, even cut our time slips down from time-and-one-half to
just Straight time. This was on the grounds that we had a first-class
coach to live in and had been properiy housed . and sheltered.
Living in a first-class coach might sound like good luck pure
"featherbedding" but Bill Moran died of pneumonia in a few days. I never
suspected that featherbedding was the cause of his un timely end.
Cold and exposure, more likely. I'm the only member of that hard- luck
crew -still living. Even the dispatcher and the train master are gone.
And they still have hard winters in Dakota
July-August, 1965
