4 September 2009
High-Level Horror for Local Man
Lethbridge Alberta - While Lethbridge residents
celebrate the 100th birthday of their iconic bridge, a former railway worker is feeling mixed emotions.
The Canadian Pacific Railway viaduct - more commonly known as the High Level Bridge - remains standing as a monument to engineering
skill.
But few Albertans have an opportunity to cross it these days.
And probably none could top his tale of terror, as a first-day employee on a train that stalled part-way
across.
Frank Toth, now retired in Coaldale, joined the railway after taking on seemingly more dangerous roles in the Royal Canadian Air Force
and then the coal mines around Drumheller.
He's putting stories of his railroading days together with others, in a memoire, "Making of a Radical," he's hoping to
publish this fall.
Toth says that first trip, during the final years of steam locomotives, started at 3 a.m.
After a basic briefing, he was asked to climb into the engine's cab and start duties as a front-end switchman.
The train headed west out of the downtown Lethbridge yard and soon they were on the bridge.
"All of a sudden the swaying, puffing engine slowed down and apparently the brakes went on."
There they were, not yet half-way across the valley, without enough steam to reach the other side.
Stalled there in the dark, crew members realized they could be hit by the next train coming from either direction.
Next, says Toth, the engineer ordered him to hustle to the rear of the train to alert the conductor - there was no radio contact in
those days - so he could light the flares used to warn oncoming trains.
"There's no place to walk out there," the novice employee warned his boss.
"That's not my problem," Toth was told.
"My foot dangled as I hung on the hand rails, trying to find something for my foot to stand on.
My coal oil lantern blew out and my unbuttoned coat flapped in the early morning, wintry wind," he recalls.
Glancing up at the engine door he hoped, to no avail, it must be a trick they pulled on rookies.
And then he suddenly realized his fear of heights.
"I began to crawl, on all fours, on the edge of the ties."
Soon he found the "safest" route might me right between the tracks, even though that meant crawling beneath four axles on
every car.
Safest, unless the engine crew generated enough steam to get moving again.
"I could just squeeze under those massive axles."
By the time Toth reached the end of the train, still on his knees, he was seeing the first glints of dawn.
"I never appreciated daylight like this before."
Toth stumbled up into the caboose, where he sounded his warning and then vowed to quit.
Not before crew members administered first aid to his bloodied knees, however, and called a CPR doctor.
Then they reminded him he was legally bound to continue that trip and they got the locomotive steamed up once again.
So Toth completed that trip and many more during the next few years with the railway.
Soon steam engines were being retired and he recalls being a member of the crew that took the first three-unit diesel
train from Lethbridge to Calgary - with an unheard of 120 cars in tow, about six times as many as the small "P1"
Consolidation engines could handle.
Once those diesels took over, however, Toth says he was among many thousands of railway employees laid off as Canadian Pacific and
Canadian National adopted the new technology.
Today, many years later, he still vividly remembers that night high atop the Lethbridge viaduct.
While he never told the story of that night to his three daughters, just two years ago his youngest, Gloria, sent him a large painting
of the High Level Bridge for his 85th birthday.
"Every toot from the railway's engine whistle reminds me of that disaster."
Dave Mabell.
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