Friday, March 22, 2024

American Locomotive Company circa 1905 - Rotary Snow Plow

Eric raised a good point pertaining to previous post (linked below) about the Rogers Pass avalanche disaster of 1910. In the block of text appearing after the shovellers shown working in tiers ... was I suggesting that the rotary snow plow chewed right into the amalgam of snow, ice and wood sitting on the roadbed?

1910 CPR Rogers Pass Avalanche - Approx. 2359hr, Friday, 4 March 1910

The text referred to the technique of first shovelling off snow in excess of the ten-vertical-feet maximum capacity of the rotary snow plow. So in this particular case, when they had shovelled down to 10 feet of snow, did the rotary start bulling its way into that mess of snow and timbers?

... In 'post-crafting' I find I often stumble back and forth between technical writing ... and an effort to do 'historical writing' - which is intended to convey 'the human experience of railroading' and/or an imagination of what a period of history was like. 

In that particular section, I was attempting to outline the techniques used to work around the capacity limits of the rotary snow plow technology - organized manual shovelling. This was just general technical writing without trying to consider all the variables confronting those trying to clear the 1910 avalanche destruction.

*  *  *

I was never interested in this disaster before I discovered contemporary newspaper articles about the experiences of the workers ... and in particular those coming from places in Asia and South Asia

... Years ago, I had some exceptional training as I prepared to work with newcomers to Canada as a volunteer, and I've since understood typical Canadian historical stories of 'foreign labourers' in that context. Imagining a reverse situation: Parachuting ourselves into typical life and work in Japan, China, or India in 1910 would have been incredibly difficult without any preparation - such as basic language classes. Except for the promises made to them by agents and jobbers, these newcomers of 1910 probably had little realistic, factual information about the 'adventures' they would have in western Canada.

... In 1910, the CPR just needed bodies pushing shovels during the winter season. There was no desire on the part of Shaughnessy's road to get 'touchy-feely' with language classes and conversation groups and 'integration' activities (to develop connections and a degree of comfort with Canadian society), or efforts to share cultural experiences (e.g. your food/my food) back and forth, canoeing, snowshoeing etc. 

... One of the articles of 1910 sort of jokes about telegraphers having difficulty with the [Asian] "code" as workers tried to send telegrams indicating they were alive and OK to family members on the coast of British Columbia. 

*  *  *

Getting back to our avalanche disaster story, and the use of the rotary snow plow to clear the line ...

If you are NOT visiting this website to risk experiencing vicarious trauma, skip the rest of this paragraph. In the area where the large 1910 avalanche buried the workers trying to clear a previous slide ... the ten feet of snow above the rail would contain ... large timbers, pieces of trees, large rocks, snow, ice, chunks of steel, humans killed by suffocation, humans who had died from traumatic injury, body parts. 

Immediately after this disaster, there would have been plenty of frantic but fruitless hand-digging for survivors when the first small groups of rescuers arrived. There is no record to indicate how long it took the second rotary to finally attend the scene, but one newspaper story says it was forced back by the quantity of timber in the slide. 

One of the Canadian newspaper accounts said that the second slide buried a quarter mile area to a depth of 50 feet. If they only moved the snow once ... to clear a 10-foot-wide strip of roadbed ... the total amount moved by rotary and by hand would be about 0.6 million cubic feet or 17,000 cubic metres of snow.

The work would have been incredibly difficult and the disaster would have been traumatic for many ... as the last paragraph of the final newspaper story suggests. 

The CPR swore up and down to the newspapers that the final death toll was 62 and that all workers were accounted for. Certainly there would be an accurate accounting of the 'regular' CPR employees with families in the area. Some of the American accounts said that many victims were swept away from the main line and might not be found until spring.

*  *  *

Alco's Rotary Snow Plow



I bought this booklet about 30 years ago - it is a 1973 reprint. It presents a fine bit of technical writing and excellent technical drawings from probably circa 1905. The rotary is described and illustrated. Then 25 rules for its operation are given. 

The rotary requires careful systematic operation and an experienced cohesive crew. The book recommends a specialized crew of three for the plow, with a second trained relief crew available. A book about the Northern Pacific states that continuous periods on duty for rotary crews in the US sometimes reached 24-36 hours before a federal law set the limit at 16 hours.

Rotaries were popular on 'Canadian' railways in the early 1900s (CPR, Canadian Northern, Grand Trunk Pacific, Reid Newfoundland, White Pass & Yukon), but it seems unlikely that many personal accounts were written by their hands-on operators - including anything specific about the 1910 Rogers Pass disaster and recovery.

This week, I searched in vain for any railway rulebooks for the rotaries which had been microfilmed by the Government of Canada. Often there are some interesting items to be found via archive.org. 

I reviewed articles which Jim Christie kindly sent me circa 2015 about CPR's MLW-built plow design. I also did a lot of searching through the professional journals at archive.org for rotary material. I re-found some of Jim's articles in the process. I also found a long article I hadn't seen for 15-20 years which I had used for a snow clearing piece on the old version of this site. 

... Consequently, I have some interesting and some surprising items ready for posting. Unfortunately, this is the time of year when we would like to forget about winter, so another post on rotaries might not be popular. But the timeless internet knows no season.

This particular booklet was mentioned in contemporary professional journals at the time. Its attractiveness and conciseness seems to have provided it with some 'earned media' among railroaders.
















Friday, March 15, 2024

1910 CPR Rogers Pass Avalanche - Approx. 2359hr, Friday, 4 March 1910

Sixty-two workers died in Rogers Pass. 

On March 1, at Wellington, Washington on the Great Northern, 96 people had been killed by an avalanche.

Note: This post contains a historical newspaper description ... of retrieving fatalities from an avalanche ... and of railway workers based on their ethnicity. 

*  *  *

I've never been interested in this particular disaster. However, because of 'unwanted results' I got during Google news archive searches, I became interested in it.

Having found the story below in an archive.org journal, I set off to try to find the story behind the ruling ... which was precipitated by not having appropriate tell tale warnings at Snow Shed 18. The Rogers Pass avalanche disaster happened to occur at Snow Shed 17.

from: Railway & Marine World, Sep 1910

I never did find an account of the accident mentioned above.

 *  *  *

To confirm that it was a different time in history which we are happy not to be living in ... consider this headline. This story was contiguous with the Ottawa Evening Citizen Page 12 continuation of the front page avalanche update - the last clipping of this post. 

It is difficult to imagine people rule-of-thumbing a rabies diagnosis with their pets today. The first experimental rabies vaccine injection in a human was performed by Pasteur in 1885.


*  *  *

Beginning to look at the Rogers Pass 1910 avalanche, here is an overview of the area.


from: Annotated Time Table; c 1905; Canadian Pacific Railway.

from: Annotated Time Table; c 1905; Canadian Pacific Railway.

Knowing nothing, I was contemplating making a wisecrack, rhetorically asking who in their right mind would build a railway near 'Avalanche Mountain'. 

I had concluded Avalanche Mountain was first named after a Canadian politician ... then it was re-named so the politician wouldn't be linked to the disaster ... and to commemorate the event.

To my surprise ... Avalanche Mountain was named by Major AB Rogers ... because ... it was a zone where numerous avalanches had been documented. The 1905 map above pre-dates the disaster.

*  *  *

from: West of the Great Divide; Robert D Turner; 1987; Sono Nis Press.

Above, you can see a sliver of an excellent map of CPR operations near Rogers Pass. Notice, that there was generally a winter track within a snow shed and a summer track outside it. Hot coal cinders were probably a summer fire hazard the early CPR didn't need jetted into the ceilings of its snow sheds by locomotives. As well, the wooden passenger equipment of the day would have been naturally ventilated with windows and clerestories; the CPR would have avoided displeasing passengers by fumigating their coaches with coal smoke every mile or so by using an outdoor summer track.

According to an opinion expressed in the Evening Citizen story ... 

"After 20 years' experience, no slides having occurred there, the company abandoned the old line which has a grade, in favour of the new line in the open. If the old line had been still in use, the disaster would not have had such fatal results or at all events, the snow sheds would have stood a chance of resisting the awful impact."

The new line in the open was at ... Avalanche Mountain.

from: Van Horne's Road; Omer Lavallee; 1974; Railfare.

Above, is Snow Shed 17 as it appeared circa 1886. While the Last Spike was driven in late 1885, a great deal of work was necessary to prepare the new line for commercial traffic in 1886. I believe this view is looking timetable west.

*  *  *

from: Google Earth

Above, looking north, you can see Rogers Pass as it appears today.
The gradients depicted are probably lessened by the view I have selected.
 See the image below.

*  *  *

from: Souvenir of My Trip through the Canadian Rockies on the CPR; undated; Canadian Pacific Railway.

Above, is a large-format photo from a CPR souvenir book. 
We have advanced and turned the corner on the Google image and are facing east.
Similar to Snow Shed 17, the shed above is a 'valley shed'.
When the line hugged a mountain rock wall, the sheds were built with more of a 'lean-to' architecture.

Indeed: Mount Macdonald was named after the Prime Minister and not some hamburger clown.

*  *  *

The workers had been clearing an avalanche which occurred at around 1200hr, Friday, 4 March 1910.

The major loss of life occurred at around 2359hr Friday, 4 March 1910.

It is difficult to see an approaching avalanche in the dark.
It is difficult to hear an avalanche on a stormy night with a rotary snowplow working.

Intuitively, we expect that the Company ordered the line to be cleared on an urgent basis after the 1200hr blockage.

On March 12, a coroner's jury was split:
Three jurors felt the CPR was negligent, the other three decided that the loss of life was unavoidable, but that the railway should take further precautions in the future.

In West of the Great Divide, Robert D Turner states that a second coroner's journey found agreement on two points: The disaster was an accident, and the railway should avoid ordering workers to clear snow slides during stormy nights.

*  *  *

Here are two American articles from the US northwest.

From: The Spokane Evening Chronicle, 9 March 1910.



Above: Contemporary rotary snowplow technology. 
(Tender not included.)

A rotary snowplow was not self-propelled. Its onboard steam engine had a regular steam throttle which provided variable steam power to the throwing wheel ... so the power could match the snow load being thrown. 

For motive power (forward and reverse at the snow face), a regular locomotive was coupled behind the snow plow tender. It was governed by signals given by an experienced snowplow foreman. This maintenance of way management employee looked forward from the snowplow cab. The cab can be seen immediately behind the throwing wheel.

*  *  *

From: The Kettle River Journal, Orient, Washington, 12 March 1910.


*  *  *

On Being a 'Real Canadian' - 1867 to 1910

Concisely: A 'Canadian' is a British subject who has the right to remain in Canada.

Details:

Foreigners who were not British subjects could become naturalized as British subjects/'Canadians' after living in Canada for three years, fulfilling a 'good character' requirement and by taking the necessary oath. However ...

There are numerous examples in history which demonstrate that the real challenge was getting into Canada ... in order to live here for three years. For example, you might be deemed to be 'unsuited to the climate' ... or direct ship transportation to Canada might not be available from your native country (see the SS Komagata Maru incident). Maybe you were a dark-skinned American ... who seemed 'likely' to have tuberculosis, etc.

British subjects from outside Canada became 'Canadians' after the 3-year residency period.

People born in Canada (who had not subsequently denaturalized) were 'Canadians'.

In the period 1900-1910, an alliance existed between Britain and Japan which prevented outright bans on Japanese immigration or devices such as the notorious 'Chinese head tax'. Generally, Japanese immigrants could be admitted if they had government-approved work contracts ... or were domestic workers in Japanese households ... or agricultural workers on Japanese-owned farms. 

A 'Canadian citizen' was first defined in the Immigration Act of 1910. As far as I can tell, the Act was the first domestic Canadian law which codified the conditions above. That is, Canadians were defined as legitimate residents of Canada and British subjects. 

*  *  *

With all of that in mind, here are two Canadian articles. 

 Being big-city newspapers, the stories must reflect the prevailing social attitudes toward non-anglophone newcomers to Canada.

From: The Evening Record, Windsor, Ontario, 7 March 1910.

Unfortunately, the microfilm quality was uneven ...


*  *  *

I believe the following three photos were taken or published by Byron Harmon showing the March 4 disaster aftermath.

The Great Glacier and Its House; William Lowell Putnam; 1982; American Alpine Club.

The photo above is not explicitly described as having been taken after the March 4 avalanches, however it was probably taken during this event. This is the right page of a large 2-page spread. It shows the technique used to feed a rotary when the depth of snow was too great to be handled by the rotary alone.

Snow may have been shovelled uphill in relays first ... to make it possible for the rotary to clear out the bottom 10-foot layer of the 'cut' into the snowbank/avalanche (a 10-foot vertical snow face being the rotary's maximum practical capacity). 

Once the rotary could operate along the rails, the labourers would then shovel the snow down the steep bank, into the trench which the rotary had created along the rails. Next, the rotary would advance and throw this snow clear of the right-of-way ... where it could safely sit until it melted in the spring.

*  *  *

from: West of the Great Divide; Robert D Turner; 1987; Sono Nis Press.

This photo was taken by Harmon at the March 4 avalanche site. You can see the tiers of manual shovelling which had been organized on the right side. As thick pieces of wood would damage the rotary, much of the debris had to be manually dug out and moved by hand. 

As is often seen in pictures like this ... Even with the rotary spinning its throwing wheel at full throttle, as it is here, workers feel safe standing on the right-of-way in front of the approaching machine. The rotary's forward speed is very low.

*  *  *

The Great Glacier and Its House; William Lowell Putnam; 1982; American Alpine Club.

This undated photo shows the resumption of traffic through Rogers Pass after the March 4 events.

*  *  *

From: The Evening Citizen (Ottawa), 9 March 1910.

Apparently, these were the contemporary terms for ethnicity used in the capital of Canada.