Fort MacLeod Alberta has always been a very windy place with the prevailing westerly gales blasting right out of the Crows Nest Pass, the entrance to which is just forty miles to the west at Lumbreck. The CPR’s station was located on the south side of the town and the yard extends for a mile to the west on the north side of the main line (this is on the Crows Nest Sub. section of the Kettle Valley line) The engine crews bunkhouse and small roundhouse were located at the very west end of the yard on a flat open area that has no shelter whatsoever from the steady wind.
I have made many trips both by train and by car into and through MacLeod (as it used to be called) and I’m certain that the tempests blow there three hundred and sixty five days every year. It has often snowed in MacLeod, but the white stuff didn’t land until it reached Bow Island one hundred miles to the east. When it rains there that wet stuff always comes down sideways.
I remember arriving in MacLeod, after being all day on a freight drag from Alyth and, after putting our train and locomotive away, walking the mile and a half over to a restaurant in the downtown area. Going over toward town was easy with the wind at our backs but walking back to our rest house was a different story. Both the engineer and I had to lean into that damn wind and often took turns walking one behind the other, to break the force of the gale. By the time we arrived back at our home away from home I was often hungry again having used all that energy fighting the wind.
One evening while talking to another engine crew in the Fort McLeod bunkhouse while waiting to be called for a drag north to Alyth we got talking about how windy it always was there and that engineer and fireman told us this story, and I believed it knowing how strong the west winds could get in that part of Alberta.
It seems that those two Calgary engine crewmen were sound asleep one dark, cold and very windy night when the locomotive foreman woke them both up and asked them to get dressed and come out to help he and the other shop employees “catch the turntable”. The Fort MacLeod roundhouse had a short hand powered locomotive turntable on the east side of the small four or five stall roundhouse and the shop staff always parked this table pointed east and west with the ends out of the prevailing wind, never north and south. This particular night the wind had caught one end of the turn-table and started it moving in circles like a
merry-go-round, and as it slowed the wind blasting around the corner of the small roundhouse would catch it and speed it up again. As mentioned, this device (used to turn locomotives and or put them in the shop) did not have a compressed air or any other kind of a motor on it. It was pushed around, after the locomotive was carefully balanced on it, by at least two men pushing on the long, heavy poles which extended out from each end. (We used to say that it had an “Armstrong” motor ) If the locomotive wasn’t perfectly balanced or if there was snow or any other material on the circular track that the table’s wheels rode on, this monster was next to impossible to move because of the total weight of it plus the locomotive load.
The employees working in that small shop kept the four roller wheels plus the turntable’s center pin very well oiled as well as sweeping off the running rail frequently in order to lessen their work. Nor did the turn-table have any form of braking device It was locked into position by sliding a heavy steel plate that fitted between the two running rails out from the table and between the rails of the track that the locomotive was to be moved off or onto. The heavy machine had to be nearly stopped before this plate could be slid into position or else the momentum of all that weight would tear out the rails of the table or track or both.
On this night, the foreman instructed a couple of men to hang on to the poles at each end of this rampaging monster and try to slow it to a stop. The speed of the dam thing was gradually slowed but not until after it had dragged those guys around like a merry-go-round for several revolutions. They all had to make sure that they kept their feet well clear of the ends of the machine when it was moving past or close to any of the rails of adjoining tracks. A foot could easily be lost by a careless cowboy trying to tame that wild steel bronco. Soon the engine crew and shop staff got the thing under control and it was safely locked into position, east and west. The men who were telling me this story said they then just went back to bed in the nearby bunkhouse.
For their help the engineer and fireman were told by the shop foreman that they would be credited with an extra hour, on duty before their train departed, in appreciation for their help in lassoing and taming that raging roundhouse renegade. Nobody admitted parking that Fort MacLeod turn-table pointed north and south that cold windy night but I’ll bet the guy who did it won’t make that mistake again.
