At Custer Creek

Old Milwaukee 15, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific's Olympian Flyer, to Seattle and Tacoma, pulled out of Chicago Union Station at 11:15 one night last week just as it has been doing for 27 years. Behind its locomotive and tender were eleven cars: a baggage and a mail car, two coaches, five Pullmans, a diner and an observation car. To Milwaukee by 1 a. m., to St. Paul by breakfast time it flashed on its 58 hour and 45 minute schedule to Tacoma. By bedtime next night, with about 160 passengers aboard, it was roaring over the high Montana plain. By midnight most of the Pullman passengers had retired. Up ahead in the day coaches, deadheading railroaders and other passengers chatted and dozed.

Miles ahead of the Olympian, where the route crosses little Custer Creek on a 27-year-old, concrete-piered trestle, near the scene of Custer's last stand, a track walker casually noted that Custer was running pretty low. And then, just after midnight, a cloudburst swept out of the mountains. Down Custer Creek, nearly dry a few minutes earlier, raced a 30-foot battering ram of water. On toward the trestle rushed old Milwaukee 15. The train started across. As the engine reached the west side, the structure fell away with a sickening crunch and into the torrent plunged the middle cars of the train. Like the snapper on a circus whip, the engine was tossed in the air and flipped backward, crushing the mail car behind it. For a moment there was no sound but the hiss of dying steam. Then men began to clamber dazedly out of the two day coaches wallowing near the west bank. Up on the other bank behind five cars remained, but one teetered dangerously on the edge. Through its corridor raced Negro Porter Lewis Williams, routing out his folks, driving them to the vestibule that remained on land. Porter Williams' charges climbed out safely, and then that car, too, tumbled down into the flood.

But beneath the raging waters lay two sleepers, one carried 50 feet by the power of the flood. From those cars there was one known survivor. At week's end 27 bodies had been recovered, one of them 50 miles down stream. But with 67 injured, 40 unhurt, perhaps 25 persons were still missing. Some of them lay dead in the one car rescuers had been unable to enter. The yellow silt of Custer Creek . seemed to have claimed the rest.

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