But it is the bed of the yard itself that is desolate. In appearance it is a mass of stones and rocks and huge boulders, so that it seems a vast quarry hewn and uncovered by the wind. There is comparatively little débris here, all this having been washed away over to the sides of the buildings, in one or two instances filling the buildings completely. There is no soft earth or mud on the rocks at all, this part of Johnstown being much in contrast with the great stretch of sand along the river. In some instances the dirt is washed away to such a depth that the bed-rock is uncovered.
The fury of the waters here may be gathered from this fact: piled up outside the works of the Open-Hearth Company were several heaps of massive blooms—long, solid blocks of pig iron, weighing fifteen tons each. The blooms, though they were not carried down the river, were scattered about the yard like so many logs of wood. They will have to be piled up again by the use of a derrick. The Open-Hearth Iron Works people are making vigorous efforts to clear their buildings. The yards of the company were blazing last night with the burning débris, but it will be weeks before the company can start operations.
In the Pennsylvania Railroad yard all is activity and bustle. At the relief station, and at the headquarters of General Hastings, in the signal tower, the man who is the head of all operations there, and the directing genius of the place, is Lieutenant George Miller, of the Fifth United States Infantry. Lieutenant Miller was near here on his vacation when the flood came. He was one of the first on the spot, and was about the only man in Johnstown who showed some ability as an organizer and a disciplinarian. A reporter who groped his way across the railroad track, the foot-bridge, and the quarries and yards at reveille found Lieutenant Miller in a group of the soldiers of the Fourteenth Pennsylvania Regiment telling them just what to do.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
Travel was resumed up the valley of Conemaugh Creek for a few miles about five days after the flood, and a weird sight was presented to the visitor. No pen can do justice to it, yet some impressions of it must be recorded. Every one has seen the light iron beams, shafts, and rods in a factory lying in twisted, broken, and criss-cross shape after a fire has destroyed the building. In the gap above Johnstown water has picked up a four-track railroad covered with trains, freight, and passengers, and with machine shops, a round-house, and other heavy buildings with heavy contents, and it has torn the track to pieces, twisted, turned, and crossed it as fire never could. It has tossed huge freight locomotives about like barrels, and cars like packing-boxes, torn them to pieces, and scattered them over miles of territory. It has in one place put a stream of deep water, a city block wide, between the railroad and the bluff, and in another place it has changed the course of the river as far in the other direction and left a hundred yards inland the tracks that formerly skirted the banks.
Add to this that in the midst of all this devastation, fire, with the singular fatality that has made it everywhere the companion of the flood in this catastrophe, has destroyed a train of vestibule cars that the flood had wrecked; that the passengers who remained in the cars through the flood and until the fire were saved, while their companions who attempted to flee were overwhelmed and drowned; and that through it all one locomotive stood and still stands comparatively uninjured in the heart of this disaster, and the story of one of the most marvelous freaks of this marvelous flood is barely outlined. That locomotive stands there on its track now with its fires burning, smoke curling from the stack, and steam from its safety valve, all ready to go ahead as soon as they will build a track down to it. It is No. 1309, a fifty-four ton, eight driver, class R, Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive. George Hudson was its engineer, and Conductor Sheely had charge of its train. They, with all the rest of the crew, escaped by flight when they saw the flood.
The wonders of this playground, where a giant force played with masses of iron, weighing scores of tons each, as a child might play with pebbles, begins with a bridge, or a piece of a bridge, about thirty feet long, that stands high and dry upon two ordinary stone abutments at Woodvale. The part of the bridge that remains spanned the Pennsylvania tracks. The tracks are gone, the bridge is gone on either side, the river is gone to a new channel, the very earth for a hundred yards around has been scraped off and swept away, but this little span remains perched up there, twenty feet above everything, in the midst of a desert of ruins—the only piece of a bridge that is standing from the railroad bridge to South Forks. It is a light iron structure, and the abutments are not unusually heavy. That it should be kept there, when everything else was twisted and torn to pieces, is one other queer freak of this flood. Near by are the wrecks of two freight trains that were standing side by side when the flood caught them. The lower ends of both trains are torn to pieces, the cars tossed around in every direction, and many of them carried away. The whole of the train on the track nearest the river was smashed into kindling wood. Its locomotive is gone entirely, perhaps because this other train acted as a sort of buffer for the second one. The latter has twenty-five or thirty cars that are uninjured, apparently. They could move off as soon as that wonderful engine, No. 1309, that stands with steam up at their head, gets ready to pull out. A second look, however, shows that the track is in many places literally washed from beneath the cars. Some of the trucks also are turned half way around and standing with wheels running across the track. But the force that did this left the light wood box cars themselves unharmed. They were loaded with dressed beef and provisions. They have been emptied to supply the hungry in Johnstown.
In front of engine 1309 and this train the water played one of its most fantastic tricks with the rails. The débris of trees, logs, planks, and every description of wreckage is heaped up in front of the engine to the headlight, and is packed in so tightly that twenty men with ropes and axes worked all day without clearing all away. The track is absolutely gone from the front of the engine clear up to beyond Conemaugh. Parts of it lie about everywhere, twisted into odd shapes, turned upside down, stacked crosswise one above the other, and in one place a section of the west track has been lifted clear over the right track, runs along there for a ways, and then twists back into its proper place. Even stranger are the tricks the water has played with the rails where they have been torn loose from the ties. The rails are steel and of the heaviest weight used. They were twisted as easily as willow branches in a spring freshet in a country brook. One rail lies in the sand in the shape of a letter “S.” More are broken squarely in two. Many times rails have been broken within a few feet of a fishplate, coupling them to the next rail, and the fragments are still united by the comparatively weak plates. Every natural law would seem to show that the first place where they should have broken was at the joints.