Re: LIttle Mudhen

Guess it depends on how much you value honesty.

What is interesing about the Latrops is that in addition to taking credit for things they did not do, are the incidents where they screwed up and left those out of their books.

Remember the story about the flanger in "Little Engines and Big Men"?

"Also in that same year, Lathrop didn't raise the flanger in a train from Crested Butte to Gunnison which was against the rules to use on with a train. If conditions were bad, you were supposed to cut off from the train and use it then go back and get the train. He claimed that an air line broke and let the flanger down, but if he was not using it he should have had it pinned up so it could not come down."

Another incident that Lathrops did not include...

"One night they called me; old Lou Lathrop sure made a boner that time. I was just sitting down to dinner when they called me. He was coming down from Crested Butte, Lou was stuck up at the Almont "sag." When you come down from Crested Butte, where you hit Almont, there's an uphill for quite a ways. Well I had run 50 cars over that hump without ever opening the throttle, but there's one curve that you had to hit pretty hard. I won a bet with "Swede" Nordstrom that I could run 50 over the hump. I learned it from Berryhill."

"Well they had the heaters on and they got the water in the tank too hot and the injectors wouldn't work, but he still had two gauges of water in the engine. They sent Braswell and me with a light engine and we had to back up there and, OH God was it cold! We couldn't start that train and we had to double it to Gunnison and get another tank of water and go back to get the rest of them. It was about three o'clock in the morning when we finished. Old Lou! All he would have to done was work the engine till he got them over the hump, well she would have drifted to Gunnison. He would have had a gauge of water, enough to run the air pump and that's all he needed, he could have come to Gunnison. I'd never have quit a train like that. Not where he did anyway! He was just off the top of the hump."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/13/2008 07:35AM by Jerry Day.