Photo courtesy Washington State Library
Quoting from an article in the Cle Elum Miner Echo:
A group of unidentified men and boys inspect a rotary plow, possibly at the Roslyn Depot on Washington Ave. Heavy snowfall on the east slopes of the Cascade Mountains virtually cut Roslyn off from the outside world in the early 1900s. The only way in or out was by train and engines pushing rotary plows were kept busy during winter months. An epic three-day storm in February 1916 dumped over five feet of snow, burying tracks and trapping passenger trains between Snoqualmie Pass and Cle Elum. Responding to the crisis, Northern Pacific Railway officials ordered Roslyn’s E.T. Lanigan to get the trains back in service and he quickly organized a 500 man crew to clear the rail yards in Cle Elum. He also crammed an additional 150 workers into cars pulled by an engine with a fixed-blade plow. They headed to Martin where an engine with a rotary plow like the one pictured above had been caught in a snow slide, marooning 90 passengers. Railroads used rotary plows with rotating blades that cut through the deep snow and were pushed by one or two engines. After Lanigan’s crew dug out the passenger train and fed the passengers, two locomotives in the front and one in the rear “forced the train through the [Stampede] tunnel and back to Cle Elum.
What surprises me most about the incident described above is how many men they were able to assemble on short order to clear the tracks. Having recently been through a cold snap with temperatures in the teens for an extended period, I sure would not want to have been one of the 90 passengers trapped on the trail and feeling helpless.
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