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Don't know if this has been mentioned here before (I tried searching, and gave up in disgust), but there is a good article by Verne L. Munger in the January 2014 issue of Trains magazine about his experience firing passenger train 41 from Ravenna to Alliance during the infamous January 1949 blizzard. I've driven from Alliance to Grand Island on Nebr. Hwy. 2 which parallels the railroad and this is a long, long stretch of no-man's land; beautiful rolling hills with lots of train action but wide open and very sparsely populated. Not the road I would want to travel in a snowstorm! When I was working in Chadron for the North Western I traveled to and from my home in Minnesota on Hwy. US 20 which paralleled the CNW line, much like Nebr. 2 and the Q line. The topography was similar, and I had some not-so-great trips in the winter on that road; especially the 100 or so miles across Cherry County which was in the heart of the Sand Hills. I don't want to say much about the article as that would spoil the story but they were darn lucky they made it to Alliance. Enroute they encountered numerous snow drifts, and managed to break through all of them, but if the train had gotten stalled in them or derailed while trying to plow through everyone may very well have perished, given the severe cold weather and lack of heat once the loco ran out of coal and water. Kurt Hayek __._,_.___
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