The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and Americas Deadliest Avalanche

The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche

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His job was made more difficult by the penny-pinching Hill, whose bottom-line financial policies inspired a strike that left the railroad short of workers and coal when those resources could have meant the difference between life and death.

Wash. rail trail evokes deadly 1910 avalanche

Occupants of Train 25, bound for Everett, had been stuck for a night at Cascade Tunnel Station, on the east side of the tunnel, before enough snow was cleared to allow the short trip to Wellington. At Wellington, the tracks rested on a foot ledge notched into a degree slope.

Trapped passengers stared fearfully up the mountain as foot after foot of snow accumulated around the skeletons of trees ravaged by a forest fire. The snow was followed by rain, freezing weather and rising temperatures, creating conditions that generated snow slides all along the pass. The stranded passengers were worried enough to demand either evacuation by foot or shelter inside the tunnel.

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Poorly paid snow shovelers, aware of the danger, walked off the job when he rejected their demand for more money. That, along with his refusal to listen to passenger demands and a coal shortage that stalled track-clearing efforts, were the primary arguments made by families who sued the railroad. Once the giants of industry, employing nearly 10 percent of all Americans, railroads were headed downhill.

Wellington was renamed Tye by the publicity-savvy Great Northern, and a concrete snow shed was erected at the site of the avalanche. Wellington was a small town populated almost entirely with Great Northern railway employees. The train stopped under the peak of Windy Mountain, above Tye Creek, where they were forced to wait for plows to clear the tracks.

Meanwhile, the snow continued, piling up in five- to eight-foot-deep drifts. Four rotary plows — locomotives with rotating blades on the front that cut through snow and blew it aside — that were sent to clear the tracks ran into difficulty.

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The first hit a stump on February 25, knocking it out of commission. Snow slides trapped the last two plows. The slides, which were strewn with rocks and timber, had to be cleared by shovel gangs before the plows could go back to work. Unfortunately, Mountain Division supervisor James H. This left both the rotary crews immobilized while trains No.

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When the Wellington telegraph lines went down, cutting off all communication with the outside world, the agitation of the passengers reached its peak. During the late night of February 28 and early morning hours of March 1, the snow that was falling from the sky turned to rain, accompanied by thunder and lightning.

Thunder shook the mountains, stirring loose walls of snow and sending them hurtling down toward the tracks. He turned toward the sound and saw a horrific sight that he would never forget. He later described what he witnessed: "White Death moving down the mountainside above the trains. Relentlessly it advanced, exploding, roaring, rumbling, grinding, snapping -- a crescendo of sound that might have been the crashing of ten thousand freight trains.

It descended to the ledge where the side tracks lay, picked up cars and equipment as though they were so many snow-draped toys, and swallowing them up, disappeared like a white, broad monster into the ravine below. The avalanche swept the passenger train and the mail train into a gulch that was more than one hundred and fifty feet deep.

Everyone — passengers, mail workers, Great Northern crew members — were all trapped inside. Some were killed instantly, while others suffocated, buried in the mounds of snow. A surviving train conductor sleeping in one of the mail train cars was thrown from the roof to the floor of the car several times as the train rolled down the slope before it disintegrated when the train slammed against a large tree. Wellington residents and crew members rushed to the crushed trains that lay far below and over the course of the next few hours, they dig out 23 survivors, many with injuries.

As news slowly made its way out of the mountains, hundreds of volunteers and Great Northern employees converged on the scene to dig out the victims.

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The injured were sent to Wenatchee. The bodies of the dead were transported on toboggans down the west side of the Cascades to trains that carried them to Everett and Seattle. The death toll from the avalanche reached 96 people, including 35 passengers, 58 railroad employees sleeping on the trains and three railroad employees who were sleeping in cabins struck by the wall of snow. An inquest that followed the disaster absolved Great Northern of negligence. Eventually, the courts ruled that the deaths had been caused by an act of God.

The immediate cause of the avalanche was the rain and thunder, but the conditions had been set by the earlier forest fire started by locomotive sparks , which destroyed the shelter that had been provided for the tracks. It took the Great Northern three weeks to repair the tracks before trains started running again over Stevens Pass. Because the name Wellington became associated with the disaster, the little town was renamed Tye. By , to protect the trains from snow slides, the Great Northern had constructed snow-sheds over the nine miles of tracks between Scenic and Tye.

The railroad also built a huge, double-track concrete snow shed in the area of the slide and, in later years, built a second tunnel through Windy Point at the trouble spot, where the slides had occurred. Still, Stevens Pass continued to pose problems for the line. In , Great Northern rerouted its tracks through this troublesome section by constructing an eight-mile-long tunnel through the mountains — the longest railroad tunnel in America — and adding forty miles of tracks.

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