A Lost Freight Car

1901

It Disappeared From the Middle of the Train

The mysterious disappearance of freight car No. 4849 from the center of a moving train between way stations on the Santa Fe road made a lot of trouble for two train crews in last March and puzzled the officials of the road not a little. The car was loaded with fruit for the eastern market and dropped out of sight midway on the journey without damage to the rest of the train and without any one having seen it go. Tracers were sent out, but the car was not to be found on siding or in depot yard.

The tracers' reports showed that the car had been loaded with select oranges on a spur leading to a well known fruit packer's establishment in the San Gabriel Valley, California. It was a new car, equipped with all the modern cold storage appliances. It was joined to a train of cars of the same class, all loaded with fruit and all destined for the same market.

The heavy train had wound its way without incident over the Sierra Madre and the Sierra Nevadas, up the gradual slopes, across the continental divide, through many villages and over sagebush plains and sandy deserts. It had toiled through eastern California, Arizona and a part of New Mexico, it had climbed the rugged steeps of the Rockies, plunged into and through the, great tunnel at the crest of that range and started on its downward flight to Trinidad.

That was as far as the tracers had been able to track it, for in Baton, a division station on the Santa Fe, No. 4849 had been noted in the conductor's report when the train was turned over to a new crew. Yet when the train reached Trinidad No. 4849 was missing, and no trace of it could be found between Trinidad and Baton. For all that the tracers knew, No. 4849 might have been whisked up into the air by balloon and transported to some foreign land.

A lot of discharges had been made out for the members of the two freight crews, and there was trouble in the air, threats of strikes and all that sort of thing because of the injustice done to the men, when suddenly the mystery was cleared up. A cowboy reported a strange find on his range, and it turned out to be the missing freight car. No. 4849 was lying at the base of a precipitous cliff in a thicket of underbrush, with its sides distended, its roof bulging and a confused mass of choice oranges appearing through the clefts of its wrecked outlines. The car was on its side, dismounted from its trucks, a mass of ruins, with its contents preserved by the crisp mountain air under a cloudless sky.

The train, in its rapid descent at sharp curve, had broken the flanges of a set of wheels, and the car was thrown from the track.

Bumping over the rough roadbed and ties had detached the couplings at either end, and the disabled car rolled down the stoop embankment to the valley, hundreds of feet below. The train being on the down grade, the rear section soon closed up the gap, and by means of the automatic couplers had again become attached to the front section, all unknown to the train crew. Thus No. 4849 dropped out of account, leaving its disappearance a deep mystery. — New York Press.

Mushing With Dogs in Alaska, Carrying Great LoadsMushing With Dogs in Alaska, Carrying Great Loads

1914

DOGS IN ALASKA.

Carry Great Loads Over Snow That Would Not Hold a Man.

Dogs are surely the real thing for "mushing" in the cold country. To my mind they beat reindeer a mile. Most of them weigh less than 100 pounds, and they distribute their weight over their four feet. So that they can trot over a weak snow crust where a man would sink out of sight by breaking through the crust into the soft snow below. On a good, level, smooth trail ten dogs can trot along with a ton of freight behind them, and 500 or 600 pounds is a fair load on poor trails.

A peculiar thing is that a twelve foot sled, twenty-two to twenty-four inches wide, with runners two and one-quarter inches wide, bearing a load of 600 to 800 pounds, will not sink through a snow crust that will not bear a man. This occurs because two runners two and one-quarter inches wide and twelve feet long give a large area of bearing on the crust. This, coupled with the motion that keeps the sled passing over all the time, accounts for the remarkable fact I am speaking of.

One of the greatest dangers in "mushing" is encountering water under the snow on the river ice in very cold weather or breaking through into hollow places where the stream has sunk away from under the ice. This is the most dangerous of all and often when it happens a man is frozen to death before he can get to shelter or get up his tent and start a fire. — B. S. Rodey in Albuquerque Herald.