Public Relations and Advertising
Department
Windsor Station Montreal Que. H3C 3E4
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Volume
7 Number 15
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Nov. 23,
1977
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ESP Gave Staysko the Edge on
Fate
By
Nicholas Morant
Engineer's "funny feelings" helped
avert derailments.
The dictionary describes "supernatural" as: "Something beyond
ordinary operation of cause and effect", or: "Something due to or
manifesting some agency beyond the forces of nature".
There are some people who are gifted with psychic powers, call them "extra
sensory perceptionists" if you wish. I knew such a person once upon a time. She
was hardly the popular picture of the turbaned charlatan, seated before the glass
globe in a circus tent backgrounded by signs of the zodiac.
She was a young woman of great charm and many abilities and worked with me at the
Banff Springs Hotel for several seasons as a public relations assistant.
One day she told me I was going to have an accident. My wife would not be with me,
but I would be accompanied by a man about twice my age. She thought it might occur on
a mountain trail and warned me to keep a sharp look out for myself at all times.
She was right. Less than three weeks later, Christian Haesler (twice my age at that
time), a Canadian Pacific Hotels' Swiss mountain guide, and myself, working on
assignment, tangled with a grizzly bear. During the six months I was in and out of
hospital I had good cause to recall her warning. More so when Haesler died as a
result of the accident a year later.
Sometime later, when I visited this lady in Toronto, she was to tell me that she
"felt" there was to be an accident as described but she admitted she never
sensed that a bear would be involved. Rather, she explained: "I assumed
the logical accident on a trail would be getting kicked by a packhorse".
Perceptive Abilities
In my first article, I mentioned Andy Staysko, retired engineman, now living in
Lethbridge, who related some of the events concerning the Phantom Train at Medicine
Hat. Whilst interviewing him, I discovered he has enjoyed, over the years, certain
perceptive abilities which the rest of us are denied.
"I was engineer on the 3091 standing at Magrath, Alberta, in June 1925, my
conductor was Peter Johnson and we had just finished switching a few cars when he
came up to the engine to see about our next move", he said.
(In those days there was one siding between Magrath and Spring Coulee to the west.
This was Bradshaw and the train orders showed it was full of cars.)
Johnson suggested to Andy they should go for the meet with the Cardston local
passenger at Spring Coulee. Andy looked at his watch and figured they had an hour and
13 minutes. Normal running time then was 35 minutes.
"Something told me I'd best sit where we were at Magrath", he recalled.
"I said to the conductor: Peter, if you fellas don't mind, I've a funny
feeling we should stop where we are and wait on that passenger"!
The conductor made it easy for him: "It's up to you my boy, we'll just
back her off the main and wait"!
This they did, but the train never showed and, since it was not reported running late,
Johnson set up his telephone and soon learned from the dispatcher that a small trestle
over an irrigation canal had been undermined by beaver and collapsed. Fortunately, the
section gang had discovered it and flagged down the passenger train minutes before it
was due to cross.
Had Andy Staysko tried to run for the meet he might well have dumped his locomotive
18 feet into 12 feet of water.
"To this day", said Andy, "I don't know what got into me"!
But he remembered the words of Fred Bryan, engineman on the passenger, whilst talking
with Superintendent C.D. McIntosh about the incident.
"Andy", said Fred, "If you live up to those hunches you should be
alive a long time"!
On another occasion, Andy Staysko was engineman on a mixed train between Consul and
Val Marie, Sask. in 1934, with Fred Connolly firing. It was springtime and there was
considerable run-off from the long winter's snow. At one point along the
line he encountered a section crew with a track motor and asked the foremen if he'd
been patrolling the area just recently.
When the answer was no, Andy's old ESP mechanism started ticking and again came the
premonition of trouble. So he backed his freight and let the section crew go ahead to
"pilot" them. Two and a half miles east of Frontier, on a slight curve,
there were the section men frantically waving their arms like so many windmills. A
badger had bored a hole beside a culvert and the spring run-off had
undermined the entire fill. When Andy stopped his train he found the tracks hanging
13 feet off the ground for a distance of a full car length.
It is interesting to note that when Engineer Andrew Staysko retired he had 65 merit
marks to his credit, so it would appear this mysterious gift served him in good stead
over the 48 years 8 months he worked in railroading.
This CP Rail News article is
copyright 1977 by Canadian Pacific Railway and is reprinted here with their
permission. All photographs, logos, and trademarks are the property of the Canadian
Pacific Railway Company.
©
2005 William C. Slim
http://www.okthepk.ca
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