This happened 37 years ago at the BN 23rd st roundhouse in Denver:

I was a nauseatingly gung ho new hire, after nine months as a hostler helper, the time came for me to enter engine service. My usual hostling partner was a fella they called "Derailing Dennis". I had managed to not only keep him out of trouble, but the midnight shift foremen had come to rely on us to do most of the dirty work, while other less motivated individuals were more concerned with hiding out than trying to get ahead.

Denny and I thought we were really great at our jobs. When my promotion came up, we crowed about how the other hostling crews didn't even know how to do their work, and that the whole railroad would grind to a halt when they broke up our team, and we were no longer there to save their asses constantly.

They had me scheduled for five days off before I was to mark up on my new job, so I was at home in bed sawing logs when the phone rang. My (ex)wife was working for D&RGW as a brakeman switchman, she was there with me, and we figured that it was the Rio Grande crewcaller looking for her.... So I answered the phone.

It was derailing Dennis. He was convulsed with laughter, and could hardly talk. He said that on this, THE FIRST SHIFT that they had to cover without us, the competition had just driven a motor into the turntable pit !!!! He said it was beautiful, that it had run over the turntable shack and high centered on the rails surrounding the pit. The fuel tank had ruptured and dumped about 3000 gallons of diesel in the pit (they had just fueled it), but it wouldn't die. There was still fuel around the pick up tube, and since this was a U-36C GEunk unit (ex NP, BN #5639), all the contactors and relays had matchbook covers stuffed in them, so the damn thing would run in the first place. Thick black smoke belched from the stack for hours, and the borate treated water froze into purple icicles. He said I had to go down there RIGHT NOW to see it.

I waited for sunrise, and took my camera (too bad I can't post a picture here...). The scene is still clear in my mind, at least 100 guys were all standing around scratching their heads. It turns out that the hostler had been taking the engine over to the turntable to turn it (duh), when the independent brake handle fell out just as he wanted to stop and let his helper line the table. He franticly ran out onto the nose of the engine, and was cranking the handbrake when it hit the turntable shack and went over the edge. At least he went down with the ship, and he wasn't hurt.

Fortunately they had it mostly cleaned up when I marked up four days later. However, for a couple weeks we were way behind on our deadwork and inspections. All our good power was trapped in the roundhouse, while our short daters and bad orders were stuck on the inbound tracks. We had two goats tied up moving the turntable on all three shifts, one on each side of the pit, with some long heavy steel cables for our hostler helpers to drag around from one engine to the other, depending on which way we needed to move the table. We had to get everything stopped within a few inches so the guys could bar it into alignment, OR ELSE, drag the cable to the other side and try again.

On one of these moves, I had to run the freshly fixed 5639 out of the roundhouse, onto the turntable. It did not particularly surprise me when the independent handle fell out of the brake stand... I just picked it up, stuck it back in, and applied the brakes (in time).

Many employees asked me for 8x10 copies of my pictures, and gladly gave me their lunch money to cover it. This included the hostler, but I did not accept his payment. Instead I thanked him for spotting the locomotive for pictures...