Railroaders' Nostalgia > S***storm

Reading Santafe199 Lance's post of the chase on the Strong city Branch in north central Kansas jogged a memory of an event I had working that branch as an engineer back in the 1980's.   Near Superior Nebraska, there is a small station of Webber, Kansas, and there is a paved county road that ran north to south on the west edge of this little town.  The crossing only had crossbucks, and one day in broad daylight traveling northbound as I approached this crossing a large pickup pulling a trailer full of cows was headed south on the county road.   I saw him coming and started really blasting on the whistle as he was not slowing down at all.   My other hand reached for the automatic brake valve as it was going to be a tie if he did not stop(a tie he would lose) as the window for him to apply his brakes was rapidly closing.   At the last second, he did see(or hear) me and slammed on the brakes so the collision was avoided.  But, the poor cows in the trailer, responded to the sudden stop by hitting the blow colon button and brown spray went everywhere out both sides of the trailer.   What a mess for someone to clean up, glad it wasn't me and that the crash was avoided.

Great story and glad it didn't end up any worse.  The farmer finally dumped his air and his cargo dumped everything else ! 

Cows probably knew they were on a one way trip and they expressed their opinion of the whole situation!

You probably remember when Willis t-boned the pot belly that got high-centered at Bazar, John. We got called to go take the leader to El Dorado. They had hosed everything down as best they could, but it was still nasty. The front windows were all gone except for a few pieces of glass and assorted 'cow parts'. After arguing for a while we mounted up and sloooowly headed to El Dorado to spot it so they could give it some attention. Unhappy as I was, it was the better option to just take it rather than stay and argue among all the 'cowernage'...and smell...oooh, oooh that smell. The smell o' dead cows around you. Humble apologies to Lynyrd Skynyrd. 

OH yeah, I was sitting on a westbound at the west end of Ellinor and heard the whole thing on the radio after Willis hit the truck.  I didn't recognize his voice for a while he was so excited.  We went dead, and so taxied to Wellington and drove by the scene, were too many people around still to take a picture but I did see the units at Kansas City later and you could smell them a long way off.

Did anybody get hurt at Bazar?  I saw that trailer all mangled up a few weeks after that happened when I was up shooting at Matfield.

Thanks.

RC Lundgren
Elgin, TX

The conductor had a slight injury to his wrist I believe...he did not dive under his desk for some reason....the engineer tried to get to the floor luckily as some aluminum was stuck in his chair afterwards.....I don't know how many cows were killed.