Above, the scene of the train accident near Harmon
on Jan. 15, 951.
SEARCHING FOR CLOSURE
Son visits site of 1951 train wreck
that left his father dead
01-29-2006: news-local
Searching for closure
By VIRGINIA GRANTIER
Bismarck Tribune
On a recent Saturday, it was 28 degrees and the cold day was standing
still. White clouds were parked on a blue sky. If there were birds in
the bushes, they weren't saying. The moment was as quiet as the snow
lying on County Road 321/2 where it crosses the train track - about
eight miles north of Mandan near Highway 1806.
Just south of Harmon Village - scattered rural homes on small acreages
near where the little town of Harmon once was.
If there was chaos in the world, this wouldn't be the spot. Not this
day.
But there was on that other day, 55 years ago.
On a Monday afternoon, Jan. 15, 1951, it was 28 degrees. Same spot. But
things weren't quiet. A train was whistling a warning. Itstrain
engineer frantically tried to get another train's attention.
Two Northern Pacific Railroad trains were coming from opposite
directions, about to have a head-on collision.
A Northern Pacific historian, Bill Kuebler, of Minnesota, said in a
recent interview it would be the last steam engine head-on collision
for Northern Pacific, which was converting to diesel engines.
In this last one, someone would die: Billy B. Rogers, 28, an Army Air
Force veteran who had served in Alaska, had come home to Glendive,
Mont., to raise a family and farm, and just recently had been trained
as a fireman for the Northern Pacific. He was on the southbound train.
His son, Michael Rogers, of Worden, Mont. - now 59, then age 5 - said
recently he doesn't want the train tragedy forgotten and is working
toward getting a historical monument placed near the site.
Andy Mork, 84, hasn't forgotten.
"It was a beautiful, clear sunny day," said Mork, of Mandan, who was
there that day. He was cutting down ash trees for fence posts with two
friends - Don and Bevan Shaw - in the family woods about a half-mile
east of the train track.
If there was something to hear, they could hear it. "You could hear
things for miles and miles," Mork said.
And they started to hear something, the "chuffing" of a steam
locomotive.
"We heard two trains,"said Don Bevan, 75, in a recent interview. "One
was 'chuffing' away from the south, the other from the north."
When two trains were heading toward each other in that area, typically
they're able to pass each other without incident because one train
would switch so the other train could enter the side track at Harmon
and continue traveling. But the tree-cutting trio noticed that things
didn't sound right. The "chuffing"wasn't slowing.
Mork remembers someone mentioning, "Hey, those trains aren't stopping."
Joe Wirtz, of Mandan, the engineer on the Northern Pacific train
heading south, knew he was supposed to stop at the switch, according to
an investigative report.
But, at Harmon, the track maintenance crew noticed that Wirtz's train
was not stopping and tried to flag the train down, only to get a "hi,
fellows" type wave from Wirtz.
Wirtz would later report that the reason he overshot the switch by
2,009 feet, giving the other train nowhere to escape, was that he was
helping Rogers, a new railroad employee, who was having trouble
maintaining adequate steam pressure.
Instead of stopping the train first, and then helping Rogers, Wirtz let
the train continue as he assisted Rogers, Michael Rogers said. If he
had followed railroad regulations, he should have stopped the train
first and then helped Rogers, knowing that there was a switch stop
approaching at Harmon, Wirtz acknowledged in written testimony taken
during the accident's investigation.
Michael Rogers said it was his dad's first solo trip after his student
trips, but it was difficult for anyone to keep a good fire going when
using lignite coal.
"It's tough to have a good fire when burning dirt,"he said.
According to text from the Interstate Commerce Commission's
investigation of the matter, Wirtz said it didn't occur to him that his
train was closely approaching the meeting point with the other train,
and he didn't sound the engine-whistle signal for the meeting point.
The northbound train spotted him, however.
The crew on the northbound train became concerned when they saw Wirtz's
train hadn't stopped short of the switch. So the engineer on the
northbound put on the brakes and sounded a warning whistle. The
northbound's fireman then alighted from the train and ran toward the
approaching train, giving stop signals.
Wirtz, after shaking the grates and raking and leveling the fire,
"leaned across his seat box with his head out of the window to recover
from his exertions," according to the commission's report.
Wirtz saw a person a short distance from his engine giving stop
signals, and Wirtz immediately put on the emergency brake, according to
a commission's report.
Michael Rogers said Wirtz then did a swan dive out the window, an 8- to
10-foot drop, to get away from the train.
"He hadn't hit the ground when the two engines hit,"Rogers said.
The crew on the other train also had jumped off the train and was fine,
in part because of a relatively soft landing into snow banks, Mork
said. In Wirtz's train, most of the crew made it out - including Wirtz
and the brakeman located above the coal and water storage area, called
the tender.
But one didn't. Michael Rogers said the weight of the train's load,
3,717 tons of coal in 51 cars, moving at 25 mph, pushed the tender into
the engine's cab and crushed his dad.
"Why he was still in there, it bothers me, and I don't know if I'll
ever find the answer,"Rogers said.
Mork and the Shaw brothers, after hearing the huge "boom" of the
collision, got on a tractor and headed across the fields to the wreck.
"It was eerie,"Mork said. The whistle from the northbound train
continued to blow the rest of the day until the steam was gone, "a
mournful sound reminding us that a death of a young man had happened."
It would take a couple of hours for Wirtz's locomotive, with its steam
pipes broken, to cool down enough for the ambulance crew to get inside
to remove Rogers. Don Shaw, who helped carry Rogers out, remembers
thinking Rogers was wearing white gloves when it was actually just the
condition of his skin from being "cooked" in the cab by the high
pressure steam from the broken pipes. The funeral record lists cause of
death as a crushed chest.
Kuebler said he plans to locate and read Wirtz's personnel file to find
out if he was penalized for the accident.
Michael Rogers said his family died the day his dad died.
"This is a wreck that destroyed a family,"he said.
At the time of the accident, Rogers was living with his grandparents at
their farm east of Glendive, where his dad grew up. Rogers said not
much was explained to him about why he was living with his
grandparents. He said there had been marital and other problems between
his mom and dad.
After his dad's death, he remained with his grandparents. His mother,
raised in California, left the family, and his three siblings were
adopted out. His sister is somewhere in California, a brother is
wandering around in Billings, Mont., and the other brother disappeared
years ago, he said.
His grandmother died when he was about 7, and he was raised by a
grandfather who gave him the job of caring for the ranch's herd of
1,500 sheep. At age 19, he left for the military, following in his
dad's footsteps.
Michael Rogers, who is disabled because of degenerative arthritis, said
it was about six months ago that he finally decided he needed to find
out more about his father. He doesn't even have anything of his
father's.
He located his father's surviving sibling, an aunt, Beverly Thornton,
of Seattle. She recently wrote letters to Michael Rogers describing how
Billy, 8 years older than she, saved her life when she was 7 and
drowning in a river during a family picnic. And how he wanted to learn
to fly so badly. He would spend hours reading aviation magazines and as
a kid made wings out of narrow boards, newspaper and tissue paper and
broke them trying unsuccessfully to flap and fly off a big hill.
"He was so full of life,"she wrote. He didn't even like to sleep,
because it was a waste of time. She remembers he read a lot, was
well-informed, and a favorite topic of conversation for him was
science, atoms, the universe. She remembers he was always saying or
doing something to make people laugh. When she didn't have money for a
35-cent movie ticket, he threw her $5. "He was good to everyone,"she
said.
On Oct. 14, a friend drove Michael Rogers to the crash site. He stood
on the exact spot. He wanted to get closure.
"I still don't feel that. Whatever closure is, I don't know," he said.
He wrote in an e-mail that his dad died moving coal that may have
heated someone's house and kept their children warm in the winter, or
generated the electricity that lighted a home so a mom could cook a
nice dinner.
"Will he be remembered for all he did for all of those people?" he asks.
(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at vgrantier@;bismarcktribune.com.)
Below, Michael Rogers at the site of
the train accident that killed his father
