2 - When The Rail Car Blew
2 - When The Rail Car Blew
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In Wenatchee the valley is divided by the Columbia River with the land to the east known as East Wenatchee, the land to the west is the town of Wenatchee. Now the main line of the Great Northern Railway runs along the river for about ten miles from South Wenatchee to Sunnyslope. It branches to the right and goes over to Chelan left to Cashmere and that is where the main line runs.
When they electrified the link to service to get through the Cascade Tunnel. They couldn’t use coal as they couldn’t clean the carbon monoxide from the tunnel. They built the dam in Tumwater Canyon then Puget Sound Power built the Rock Island Dam about 1929. After World War II they were starting to use diesel loco’s and were starting to install blower fans for the tunnel. All of this is for background to give you the big picture.
Where we lived on Millerdale was about two miles from the roundhouse. The roundhouse was built to turn the steam locomotives around for the trip back to Spokane. At the roundhouse they had a repair shop to completely tear the electric loco’s apart and rebuild them. They had switch engines and about fifteen switch crews as they would build the big trains to take the fruit to market as well as the passenger trains to come through Wenatchee twice a day. So you can see that at one time the Great Northern was the single largest employer in the valley.
About 1973 the trains were winding down but they still had all the shops, roundhouse, marshalling yards, Ice house etc in South Wenatchee. This day started out like all days and looked to be another uneventful day. Chuck Krone and myself were delivering milk to the large supermarkets by semi truck. We had just received a new tractor and after the morning delivery we had to take it to the Chevy Garage for servicing. We put the jacks down on the trailer. Chuck took the tractor next door then came into the office. As I was finishing the morning paper work we heard a thump and I looked at Chuck and said "Damn that trailer has fallen over". We ran outside and looked over the building. The trailer was OK. When we turned around to go back inside there was a big mushroom cloud going up into the air from South Wenatchee. He looked at me and said "someone just hit South Wenatchee with a nuke". We soon found out there had been an explosion at the roundhouse.
See pics at Big Bend Railroad History
Read articles at historylink.org or at gendisasters.org
There had been three cars filled up with fertilizer from Dupont. As the switch engine crew was switching the cars the front one blew up. It made a hole forty feet deep in the ground and about one hundred feet across. It blew pieces of the car for about two miles around and set all kinds of fires. Almost no one was killed. One hobo going to the bathroom in one of the buildings was killed. He was the only one. Houses around were filled full of holes by rocks and pieces of the railroad cars. It blew a lot of buildings down and broke all the glass windows out of the roundhouse. Destroyed a restaurant and hotel (both empty) that was across the road from the blast. The front carriage of the railway car was wrapped around a flat bed trailer going along the road put the driver in the hospital but like I said only one fatality.
No one knows why it blew up and it had no detonator but it did blow up anyhow. As big a blast as it was the passenger train came through on the main line two hours later and never had to slow up. It took a week to fill in the hole and repair the tracks. Put the boxcars back to normal. One of the fellows working at the Plaza Superjet Market was fishing at Moses Lake the blast went high enough for him to see it seventy miles away. When the mad bomber in OK used fertilizer you saw what the effect was. Utter devastation.
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