Chapter 1: A Fateful Discovery
February 26, 1940. Morning.
Harold Credwell was not the luckiest of people. Born to a poor lumberjack and a devout Irish Catholic mother, he frequently traveled around the Western United States with his family. When the Great Depression hit, his family told him that he had to fend for himself. Jobs were scarce and dragging along a seventeen-year-old boy was not going to improve their chances. Harold had no choice but to agree.
For the past ten years, Harold had lived in the sleepy mountain town of Felton, where he worked for the nearby Kaiser Pavement Company, which ran a sand quarry up in Olympia. Harold was now in his mid-20s, but he had failed to do much with his life other than briefly make some money. Unfortunately, Harold had a strong - even predictable - habit of spending said money at the nearest bar.
February 26 was a cold and wet day. The quarry had shut down for the week due to the heavy late winter rains and Harold was out of money and out of options. He owned a small cottage in Felton Grove that he had purchased with money his grandfather had given him a few years earlier. In reality, the house was more a shack and was never intended for somebody to live in year-round. It also sat in one of the lowest parts of the San Lorenzo Valley. Today, it was about four feet underwater. Lucky for him, the only possessions that he kept there were a bed and a few canned foods. Harold didn’t eat much - a good stout beer usually worked well enough.
Sitting on the fence beside the main road to Felton, Harold watched the river flow over and through the homes of his neighbors, reflecting on what decisions in life led him here. In his hand, he drank a bottle of cold lager, oblivious to the irony. A water bucket floated past the fence and in it was scrap of paper. He reached down and grabbed the scrap and discovered, much to his amazement, that it was a Southern Pacific Railroad ticket, and it was for that evening’s train from Felton to San Jose!
Rummaging through his pockets, Harold found a few loose coins and his pocket watch, the only thing of value that he owned. It was not much, but it could be enough to get him out of this wet, cold little cul-de-sac of a town. He hopped off the fence and trudged through the rising water in the direction of the railroad station to the east. Today, Harold told himself, I am going to do something new...
February 26, 2018. Morning.
It was an unusually warm late winter’s morning when I found myself browsing the internet searching for more information related to the closure of the railroad route through the Santa Cruz Mountains in seventy-eight years earlier. I had the basics: a bad winter storm, the afternoon train redirected to Watsonville Junction, washouts and sinks all along the line, and then the railroad petitioning for abandonment a few months later after a bazaar P.R. campaign that still makes my head hurt.
You can figure this out, Derek, I told myself as I sat at my desk. Yet I could not help feeling that something was missing. For example, why don’t any of the newspaper timetables show the redirected route in the days after the route was closed? In fact, why were the newspapers so silent regarding anything related to the actual closure—most of the articles I read only discussed resuming operations, and financials, and grand plans for the future. The only photographs I had were a dozen or so poor-quality survey photos from the week after the disaster, but only two of the tunnel portals were in any of these and the newspapers remain strangely silent.
Scratching my head, I make the decision to remove all filters on my Newspapers.com search in the hope that something would pop up in another newspaper, perhaps one less directly involved in pre-war Santa Cruz County politics. Scrolling through the list of hundreds of matches, an article dated March 2 in the Reno Evening Gazette caught my eye.
Southern Pacific Covers up Accident?
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – Southern Pacific Railroad suffered a significant setback last week when its route between San Jose and Santa Cruz was heavily damaged by a storm that swept through Santa Cruz County on the afternoon of February 26.
The railroad company reports that only one train was scheduled to operate over the route that evening, but that it was redirected to Watsonville Junction. However, a number of witnesses report seeing the train leave from Santa Cruz Depot for San Jose over its aforementioned route in the evening, as scheduled.
The reported torrential rains only began falling after the train departed the station. Locals in the town of Felton, a mountain stop, claim to have seen the train at the station slightly behind schedule before continuing up the grade to the summit.
The train never made it to its destination, though. The station agent at Los Gatos Depot, on the other side of the mountains, avoided questioning, while officials in San Francisco for the railroad company refuse to comment on the matter except to reiterate that the train was redirected.
It is unknown if the train was carrying any passengers at the time it disappeared. Many businesses were closed due to the storm, and both Santa Cruz and Felton were experiencing flooding not far from their respective depots. The train crew could not be identified for comment.
This was an entirely new angle. Was there an evening train or was the newspaper just following a bad lead? My investigation had only just begun...
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. While some elements may be based on historical fact, the events described are entirely the author's own creation.
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