-
Difficulty:
-
-
Terrain:
-
Size: 
(regular)
Related Web Page
Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions
in our disclaimer.
This cache is located off of one of our many trail systems. some stealth may be needed for this one but i am sure it will be fine. Inside you will find a short story about the ghost train that has been spotted in and around dunmore and in medicine hat.
THE GHOST TRAIN - from a book of short stories by Ken Liddell
Andrew Staysko, who retried in 1955 after 48 years in Canadian Pacific train service, pulled his treasured engineer’s watch from his shirt pocket, where he had carried it since vests went out of style. It was time to catch the ghost train. You can believe or disbelieve this story, but Mr. Staysko produced documented evidence that something mighty strange happened on two occasions amid the cutbanks at Medicine Hat in the summer of 1908.
Bob Towhey was the engineer and Gus Day the fireman on an engine traveling light from Medicine Hat to Dunmore, about 23 o’clock one night in June of that year. At Dunmore they were to couple to the Spokane Flyer. It was a fast CPR train that ran from St. Paul to Spokane on the Canadian lines, via Portal, Moose Jaw, Lethbridge, Cranbrook and thence south from Yahk to Spokane. The Spokane Flyer did not enter Medicine Hat proper, and the crews that took it westward to Crowsnest Pass, or brought it back, finished duty at Dunmore Junction.
This night Towhey and Day were two miles out of Medicine hat when, before them, appeared a train approaching on the single track line that wound around the hills as the tracks climbed a steep grade from the valley to the tableland of the prairie. As Gus Day recalled many years later, the headlight of the approaching train seemed to be the size of a wagon wheel. The reflection ahead was as though the firebox was open on the locomotive of the approaching train and it lit the dark sky of the night!
Day shouted to Towhey and made for the gangplank to jump. Towhey reached for the brake valve, but his hand stopped mid air. The approaching train whistled a warning signal for the curve around which Towhey’s train had just come. Day stood at the cab doorway, Towhey’s hand remained suspended before the brake valve and the minds of each man were suspended by emotions.
Then a long string of phantom coaches sped past. The windows were lighted and crew members of the phantom train waved a greeting from places where crew members would be expected to be found to wave greetings as trains passed. The phantom train disappeared.
Towhey and Day, each fearful of what the other might have thought had they expressed their feelings, said nothing. They continued to Dunmore, coupled to the Spokane Flyer, and finished the night without incident. Two weeks later, the railroaders met on the street in Medicine Hat. Perhaps feeling safer with the passage of time, they found the courage to ask each other about what each had seen, or thought they had seen, that startling night. Each was thankful to learn that the other had witnessed the same sight and had experienced the same eerie feeling of having seen a ghost engine pulling a string of cars. “I’m going to lay off for a couple of trips,” Towhey told his fireman. Day stayed on the job.
A few nights later, Day was on the same engine going for the same duties. This time the engineer was J. Nicholson, replacing Towhey who had booked off. At exactly the same spot the phantom train again appeared, headed straight for them with whistle blowing and headlight burning. And again it simply evaporated into the darkness as its crew members waved greetings from their positions on the engine and cars.
On the morning of July 8, 1908, Day again reported for duty and found he was assigned to yard service. H. Thompson took Day’s place as fireman on the engine that made a morning trip to Dunmore to pick up the Spokane Flyer, this time to take it eastward to Swift Current. Thompson’s engineer was J. Nicholson.
They left Medicine Hat and headed into the hills. About 100 yards from the spot where the phantom train had been seen on two different nights and by two different crews, another train appeared around a curve, headed straight for them. But this time it was daylight and it was for real. It was No. 514, the passenger train coming in from Lethbridge. And the man at the throttle was Bob Towhey, who had overcome his fears and had returned to work.
The inevitable happened. The outbound engine and the inbound train collided. The wreck took the lives of Towhey and Nicholson, the engineers, both of whom had earlier seen the phantom train at the same spot. It also took the lives of a fireman named Gray, a conductor named Mallett and seven of the passengers. Thompson escaped by jumping from his engine. He later recalled that just before the crash he had seen a farmer on the hill waving his arms wildly. The farmer could see what was coming, but his wave was mistaken as a friendly greeting.
Some years later The Locomotive Engineer, a weekly newspaper of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers published a story about a phantom train in Colorado. By this time Gus Day had retired and was living in Victoria. He read the story and it brought vivid memories of the strange sights he had seen on two occasions on the way to Dunmore.
He told his story to C. Moriarty, who turned it into an article for the Vancouver Sun. When he got to the part about the collision that followed the two trips of Alberta’s phantom train, Mr. Moriarty wrote with personal knowledge. He had bee a Canadian Pacific telegrapher at Calgary at the time and had handled a press story about the crash.
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)