Tuesday, February 16, 2010
City of San Francisco Train Disaster
February 12, 2010
This past week, we watched a television program on PBS where we saw the disaster that struck the City of San Francisco train in 1952. This morning, while going through some of my father’s old files, I found a picture of him standing in front of the “City of San Francisco” in 1938 at the Southern Pacific Depot in Sacramento, CA.
I checked out the “City of San Francisco” on the internet this afternoon and found the following article and photgraph of the same train!
"The City of San Francisco is perhaps best remembered for the January, 1952 disaster when a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada Mountains entrapped the train for 6 days at Donner Pass, California. The incident occurred when snowdrifts from the blizzard's 160 km/h (100 mph) winds blocked the train, burying it in 3.6 meters (12 feet) of snow and stranding it from January 13 to January 19. The event made international news headlines. In the effort to reach the train, the railroad's snow-clearing equipment and snow-blowing rotary augers became frozen to the tracks. Subsequently, hundreds of workers and volunteers, including Georg Gärtner, using manual snowplows, tractors and manpower came to the rescue by clearing the adjacent Lincoln Highway (the first road across America) to reach the train. The 196 passengers and 20 crewmembers were evacuated within 72 hours, on foot through the snow, to vehicles which transported them to emergency facilities at Nyack Lodge on the highway. The train itself was finally dug out several days later."
Albert J. Lebeck, standing in front of the
This past week, we watched a television program on PBS where we saw the disaster that struck the City of San Francisco train in 1952. This morning, while going through some of my father’s old files, I found a picture of him standing in front of the “City of San Francisco” in 1938 at the Southern Pacific Depot in Sacramento, CA.
I checked out the “City of San Francisco” on the internet this afternoon and found the following article and photgraph of the same train!
"The City of San Francisco is perhaps best remembered for the January, 1952 disaster when a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada Mountains entrapped the train for 6 days at Donner Pass, California. The incident occurred when snowdrifts from the blizzard's 160 km/h (100 mph) winds blocked the train, burying it in 3.6 meters (12 feet) of snow and stranding it from January 13 to January 19. The event made international news headlines. In the effort to reach the train, the railroad's snow-clearing equipment and snow-blowing rotary augers became frozen to the tracks. Subsequently, hundreds of workers and volunteers, including Georg Gärtner, using manual snowplows, tractors and manpower came to the rescue by clearing the adjacent Lincoln Highway (the first road across America) to reach the train. The 196 passengers and 20 crewmembers were evacuated within 72 hours, on foot through the snow, to vehicles which transported them to emergency facilities at Nyack Lodge on the highway. The train itself was finally dug out several days later."
Albert J. Lebeck, standing in front of the"City of San Francisco" in 1938.
City of San Francisco
City of San Francisco
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)