The officers and men of the 770th Railway Operating Battalion had long experience operating railroads; thought themselves prepared for just about any challenge. Warnings from the civilian railroaders of the WP&YR fell on deaf ears.
Then they met the little railroad that could.
Captain Richard L. Neuberger told the story of the worst storm of the winter in the November 27, 1943 Saturday Evening Post.
“The mercury plummeted out of sight… Couplings that were wet had to be separated with acetylene torches. Metal became brittle and drawbars snapped under the loads. Fire doors in snorting, straining locomotives were coated with half an inch of frost. Exhaust steam pouring back into engine cabs froze the overalls of the G.I. crews as stiff as planks. Only one injector could be used, the second being turned into the water tank to keep the water from freezing…
“One by one, the desperately puffing narrow-gauge engines quit… On the wind-swept basalt near Fraser Loop, Colonel Wilson and twenty-two soldiers with him shoveled snow into the tanks of engines No. 81 and 62 to maintain water in the boilers; the water towers along the track were frozen as hard as granite. The coal in the tenders ran out and the soldiers began to chop up stacks of spare ties to keep the engines alive. When 81 and 62 at last succumbed to the blizzard, Colonel Wilson and his G.I. railroaders were marooned. They took refuge in a tiny cabin near the line…”
Four days on, food ran perilously low. The Colonel pinned his hopes for rescue on Engines 66 and 69 in the shops at Skagway or a new locomotive making its way up the Inside Passage from Prince Rupert.
The fifth day dashed his hopes.
Neurenberger continues:
“…Colonel Wilson received word by telegraph, the only mechanical facility functioning in the storm, that 66 and 69 were frozen fast on the mountainside, midway between Skagway and Fraser… The storm was preying on them at sea as well as on the land. Wilson and his men learned that the barge en route from Prince Rupert had become overloaded with ice and that No. 253 [the new locomotive] was at the bottom of the bay near Chilkoot Barracks.
“From Carcross a D-4 cat bucked high winds across the frozen surface of Lake Bennett, ascended the pass and got through to the cabin with a load of food. ‘That bulldozer,’ said Wilson, ‘looked to us like six regiments with colors flying.’