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Burlington Bulletin #40 The Cole Creek Disaster Wyoming Flood of 1923 Rebuilding
Burlington Bulletin #40 The Cole Creek Disaster Wyoming Flood of 1923 Rebuilding the railroad Bonneville to Lysite, July-November 1923; LOTS of photos 44 pages
Notice damage
All black and white issue. Severe flooding that hit the Q's Casper Division mainline in Wyoming during summer and fall 1923. The first article covers the rebuilding and relocation of 20 miles of mainline between Bonneville and Lysite, while the second deals with the disastrous wreck of Denver-bound passenger train No. 30 which crashed through a flood-weakened bridge just east of Casper on Sept. 27, 1923.
Here's another issue of the BULLETIN that comes to you thanks to the efforts of a society member. Richard Patterson, a resident of Worland, Wyoming, had long heard of the Cole Creek disaster of 1923 in which numerous lives were lost when Denver-bound passenger train No. 30 plunged through a flood-weakened bridge into the swollen torrent of normally dry Cole Creek, a few miles east of Casper. The incident was well known and probably one of the most photographed railroad accidents anywhere - something you wouldn't expect in sparsely populated Wyoming. So Richard went to work and studiously researched the accident, submitting his draft article to me once he had it put together. This was when I first learned he was working on it. I was able to add some details on the equipment that made up the train that fateful night and to provide a number of photo sources - including BRHS member Archie Hayden, the library of the Colorado Railroad Museum, and my own collection.
As I was preparing Richard's article for publication, I recalled details in Burlington's annual reports of the time about the extensive flooding in Wyoming that plagued the railroad in 1923. Serendipity struck when I received - unsolicited - a copy of a Railway Age article on the flooding and the repair efforts that followed. This seemed a logical companion piece to Richard's wreck story, so I tracked down an original copy of the magazine in the collection of Jim Young of Knoxville, Iowa, and added a number of photos that were taken during the flood repairs by railfan photographer H.E. High of Denver.
It never ceases to amaze me how BULLETIN features such as these seem to almost fall together once the initial steps are taken. The next issue, on Q narrow gauge 2-8-0 No. 537 is another example of this serendipity, which I'll expound upon in that issue. Meanwhile, I hope you'll enjoy this issue. The details of recovering bodies may be a bit much in light of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, that we're all still dealing with, but they are as much a part of the 1923 story as they are of today's disaster, so I left them in for historical accuracy and completeness.
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