Frank Wright Story

This is one of the stories Frank Wright shared with me. Lots more like this will be in the Crested Butte book. His stories were why 474 is my favorite engine.

I was engineer on the 474 and M.O. Plewes was the conductor. I could see that Slate Cut had slid in, so I stopped. The conductor and brakeman got off the coach and I backed the train down and told Plewes that we could not make it and he said that he did not want to go back to Gunnison without trying it. So I told him to cut the engine off and we took a run at it. The first time we hit it we made about three car lengths. I got the engine reversed and got back out that time. But, when we hit it again, the snow fell in behind us and I got back a few feet and could not move either way so we had to shovel the engine out. I asked Plewes if he wanted to hit it again and he said no he was satisfied so we backed to Gunnison and I got out the next day on the Rotary. I should have refused to hit it the first time as I knew we didn't have a chance of making it as Merle Dunlap and I tried it once we were taking a light engine back to Crested Butte and it was early in the morning, not too good light yet and he ran into a slide at the west end of the cut and we had to shovel the engine out and by the time we got it moving again, we could see the upper end of the cut and knew we didn't have a chance, so we backed down to Gunnison. The only way you could clear Slate Cut when it slid in was with the rotary. I used to worry some about hitting it coming down with a train of coal behind you, but to the best of my knowledge that never happened and I know I would have got off the engine if I could have before we hit it.