When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days

High inside locomotive 6019, engineer Tom Sapunor notched the throttle forward and squinted at the track ahead—not that he could see much of it. The blizzard that had barreled into the Sierra Nevada mountain range three days earlier had blanketed most everything, its 90-mile-per-hour gusts sweeping the snow into 25-foot drifts.

On a normal run, the Southern Pacific Railroad’s City of San Francisco train could whisk passengers from Chicago to San Francisco in 40 hours and 15 minutes. But this wasn’t a normal run, even by the standards of “the Hill,” the perilous trackage between Sparks, Nevada, and Roseville, California, whose high point stood 6,880 feet above sea level. The company’s advertising boasted that there was “no tougher stretch of railroad in the country”—a hard truth that the City’s 226 occupants were about to learn firsthand.

Near Yuba Pass in California, a snowdrift broadsided the train. As the City’s three locomotives struggled to burrow though, a second mass of snow—this one around 12 feet tall—struck the train and literally stopped it in its tracks. The diesel engines pulling the 15-car City cranked out a combined 6,750 horsepower. Sapunor tried to push ahead. Then he tried backing out. The diesels growled and smoked, but it was no use.

“That’s it,” he said. “We can’t make it.”

Sapunor uttered those fateful words 73 years ago, presaging one of the most dramatic mishaps in American railroading. By the night of Sunday, January 13, 1952, snow would bury the train, entombing everyone inside for the next three days.

If a debacle on this scale is surprising today, it was all but unthinkable in 1952. The City was among America’s premier trains, a luxury streamliner that could hit 110 miles per hour while white-jacketed waiters balanced trays of cocktails. The “Overland Route” it traveled—built as part of the Transcontinental Railroad—embodied Manifest Destiny itself. “Did you know that you can board a modern streamliner in Chicago and travel at your ease the same route the ’49ers struggled over in the Gold Rush?” an advertisement asked. “Well, you can.”

“The history of the West is one of struggle of mankind against nature,” says Sarah Keyes, a historian at the University of Nevada, Reno. “In the post-World War II world, [that] these elite folks can still be trapped for days in the mountains is terrifying—and a continuation of a cultural legacy.”

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Reassured that rescue plows were coming, passengers didn’t panic at first. Some bridge games and a singalong kicked off in the lounge car, with selections including “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and “California, Here I Come.” According to Robert Church’s Snowbound Streamliner: Rescuing the 1952 City of San Francisco, Sapunor later said, “As long as we had water for heat, the people seemed perfectly contented.”

By midday Monday, however, lights inside the train—limping along on battery power—dimmed and then blinkered out. When the steam generators’ water tanks ran dry, heat disappeared, too. Outside, the thermometer stood at 22 degrees Fahrenheit. “The cold didn’t take long to get into the cars,” passenger Howard Jones told the New York Times. “There wasn’t much else we could do outside of walk up and down to keep warm.”

Riders swaddled their feet with curtains torn from the train’s windows. They broke apart wooden chairs and berth ladders and lit campfires with them. As a 1953 article published in Trains & Travel noted, a few of the more dedicated staff on board took care of “latrine patrol” using melted snow and buckets scrounged from the baggage car. Furniture salesman Mark Sullivan was among the passengers who realized that members of the Donner party had frozen to death nearby a century earlier. “People talked about it quite a bit,” he told the San Francisco Examiner.

By Monday night, the snow had risen above the train’s windows.

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When all four of its rotary plows failed to break through, the chastened Southern Pacific called in help from volunteers.

“In the 1950s, you had this mid-century hubris—technology could conquer all,” says Ty Smith, director of the California State Railroad Museum. “Part of the reason this episode happened was this unyielding optimism that we could solve every problem. In the face of a blizzard in the Sierra, that just wasn’t true.”

The United States Sixth Army, the California Division of Highways, and the Pacific Gas & Electric Company marshaled men. But it was a ragtag group of skiers from the Soda Springs Hotel who finally reached the train Monday night with food, blankets and medical supplies.

An eerie spectacle awaited Roy Claytor, the first rescuer aboard. “There was no heat and lights. Everybody was bundled up in coats and blankets,” he observed. “Railroad lamps were burning. Nobody said anything.”

Among the passengers was Ohio physician Walter H.L. Roehll, who’d boarded the City with his wife for the couple’s first vacation in 15 years. Fate had other plans. Late on Monday, people began blacking out and collapsing—just one at first, then 30 and then 60. Roehll deduced the cause: Portable propane heaters fired up by some of the crew had sent a cloud of carbon monoxide creeping through the cars.

Jan 1952 Newsreel: City of San Francisco Trapped on Donner Pass.mp4

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With little thought for their own safety, several young servicemen sprang into action. “Some of the people were pretty far gone,” Naval Reserve mechanic Harold A. Norcross told the Associated Press. “We had handkerchiefs tied across our faces, and we dragged the people out to where they could be given artificial respiration.”

Poison gas wasn’t Roehll’s only problem. When a morphine-addicted passenger lurched into withdrawal, the doctor shot him up with his only syringe—sterilized with gin from the bar—then stashed the man in a sleeper compartment.

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Come Tuesday—day two of the ordeal—some passengers started to deteriorate mentally.

Food rationing had begun on the first day, but by now, the dining car’s larder was nearly empty. Steward Edward Tschumi had tried to make the best of it, joking that he’d be serving pheasant under glass even as he handed out spaghetti, but one of the cooks grew frustrated and dove out of a window. A group of passengers plotted an escape—at least until crew talked them out of it. An elderly woman rose from her seat and screamed, “They can’t keep us [here] any longer. They can’t. They can’t.” Another woman rushed to her side and talked her down.

Fortunately, deliverance was closer than many realized. That morning, the Southern Pacific had sent a rescue train westbound from Reno, loaded with food and medical supplies. When it derailed at Soda Springs, the dauntless liberators resumed their journey by dog sled.

At the lead was a Samoyed named Rex, known locally as Rex the Blizzard King. “This dog did rescues of small planes that crashed on Donner Pass as the lead dog of the sled that brought the doctor up,” says author and historian Mark McLaughlin. As McLaughlin tells it, authorities tracked Rex down at a dog show, then “they flew him, dropped him off, and his trainer put him in with the other dogs.”

The dogs pulled the men as far as Nyack Lodge, a restaurant popular with motorists on Highway 40. There, the group met a Pacific Gas & Electric crew equipped with a Sno-Cat, which took them the rest of the way to the train.

Passengers would have to endure one more night aboard the train to allow time for a crew of 30 laborers to complete a thousand-foot trench from the train to Highway 40, by now partially cleared. Among the shivering were reporter Art Hoppe and photographer Ken McLaughlin. Their editor at the San Francisco Chronicle had ordered them to get to the train by any means necessary. They walked.

McLaughlin was glad that he’d stashed a bottle of liquor in his camera bag, though even the restorative powers of booze only went so far. “As the night wore on, the train got colder and damper, and the foul air seemed almost to curdle,” he later recalled. “It got so cold I groped my way forward to where the diesel engine was running and managed to thaw out a bit.”

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The City of San Francisco only relinquished its passengers on Wednesday morning, after three days of holding them captive. The travelers staggered off the train and trudged up to the highway. There, cars took turns motoring them a few miles to the Nyack Lodge.

“They returned to civilization sunken-eyed and tired, the mark of the ordeal on their faces,” the San Francisco Examiner reported.

Those passengers who felt like talking to reporters praised Roehll, who’d subsisted on coffee and naps, treating scores of patients he’d never met before.

“All I did was what I had to,” the doctor told the Los Angeles Times. A passenger responded, “He saved our lives, and don’t let him tell you he didn’t.”

The City’s stranding made many ordinary people into heroes, but two made the ultimate sacrifice. Rolland “Rolly” Raymond died when the snowplow he was driving flipped over on top of him. A heart attack felled Pacific Gas & Electric worker Pershing Jay Gold, who was only 33. Despite having a pre-existing heart condition, Gold fought his way through the drifts to bring food to the train.

On Wednesday night, after warming up at the ski lodge’s fireplaces, the bedraggled passengers boarded a special train that included eight Pullman sleepers and two dining cars. No streamliner equipment awaited the travelers this time: These cars were riveted steel battlewagons from the 1920s. They were heavy, quiet and toasty. The Southern Pacific had retired these cars, regarding them as worn and ungainly—but they showed their value on this night. Filing into the diners, passengers promptly devoured every steak, fried chicken and lamb chop aboard. Southern Pacific picked up the dinner tab.

San Francisco lay seven hours ahead. A club car opened for those who felt like socializing, but the call of the sleepers was more than many passengers could resist. That night, Pullman conductor R.C. Barnes told the Associated Press, “they hit the sack very hard.”

Robert Klara | READ MORE

Robert Klara is journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. Klara is also the author of three books on American history.