Don't Worry, We'll Get It

One night a car was reported running loose on the Summit grade. The car, a gondola of wire, got away from Conrail who was storing it on the Rahway Valley track at Summit. Robert “Bob” Guthlein, friend of Bernie Cahill, communicates the following story which Cahill told him:

Up in Summit they had a yard up there. Bernie hadn’t been up there in years. So he gets a call from Conrail telling him that a gondola – I think it was loaded with wire – got away and ran down the hill. Conrail wanted permission to come down and get the gondola. Bernie said “Of course not, I’m not letting you idiots on my railroad.”

So he gets the engineer, Harry Davis, and they take one the engines – Bernie never said which one – and they head up the hill. There was an FRA inspector who happened to be on the property so he says “I’ll take a ride with you.”

They get into Springfield and there’s the car sitting there in all the shrubbery. They couple up to the car, pump up the air, and head up the hill. They’re part way up the mountain – and that was a pretty good grade – and they lose the air, they start going down the mountain backwards. They finally get to the bottom and the FRA inspector says “I’ve had enough, pick me up on the way back,” he’s not going up the hill again. They checked and figured out that there was a young tree and either the trunk or a branch had hit the air valve and dumped all the air on them.

So they figure they’ll watch for that, they get by that, and they get up to the top. There was a bridge over – I can’t remember the name of the street up there in Summit, it was only a short bridge – but it had been exed out, you couldn’t use it. So the engineer says to Bernie, “What’re we going to do?”

Bernie says “Well we’ll push the car out onto the bridge, we’ll call Conrail, and they can come and get the car. There’ll be no locomotive on the bridge.”

“Fine” the engineer says.

They get up there, the engineer hits the brakes, and they’re running through the weeds, they’re on the grass, and they slide right out onto the bridge. The engineer says to Bernie, “What do we do now?”

Bernie says, “Well we’re here, you might as well go the rest of the way.”

This is just one of many stories told of runaways on the grade up to Summit on the Rahway Valley, but this is perhaps the only one where the RV was able to charge for a car movement! Thank you for the story Bob.