The Custer Creek Train Wreck

By Editor

Prairie County, Montana, June 19, 1938

The water came first as sound.

In the sleeping cars of the westbound Olympian, the passengers heard it before the bridge went. A low, continuous roar from somewhere below the prairie, from somewhere that should have been dry. Custer Creek was a trickle in June. It was a ditch. The Milwaukee Road had built Bridge AA-438 across it in 1913, a 180-foot pony plate girder structure with five trestle slabs and sixteen feet of clearance above the normally dry creek bed, and in twenty-five years of service the bridge had never been tested by anything more than a seasonal runoff. The engineers who built it had designed it for the country as it was, not for what a cloudburst could make it.

The cloudburst had come on the evening of June 18, upstream and invisible in the dark badlands of Prairie County. It dumped several inches of rain in a short period onto impermeable clay soil, and the water had nowhere to go but down. It gathered in draws and coulees and ran toward the creek, carrying with it topsoil and sagebrush and boulders, and by the time it reached Bridge AA-438 the creek had risen from a few feet to over twenty. The surge was carrying trees. It was carrying the banks themselves.

The bridge piers were founded in that same clay, and the clay was giving way.

At 12:35 in the morning of June 19, the Olympian No. 15 was running at approximately fifty miles per hour across the flat eastern Montana prairie, eleven cars behind a steam locomotive of the 4-6-2 type, carrying 152 passengers and crew. It was a summer train, a tourist train, full of people going west: families bound for the national parks, business travelers connecting to the Pacific Northwest, a smaller contingent of local people moving between the small towns of the high plains. The Olympian was the Milwaukee Road's flagship, inaugurated in 1911 as the first all-steel passenger train in the Pacific Northwest, and it had not killed a paying passenger in over twenty years of service.

The locomotive crossed the bridge. The tender crossed. The first two cars crossed.

Then the bridge moved.

The piers had been scoured free of their foundations. The structure shifted laterally in the current, and the third car went into the water, and the fourth, and the cars behind them jackknifed and telescoped and some of them inverted in the torrent. The creek was twenty feet deep and running fast and cold with the debris of the upstream country. The sealed windows and doors of the Pullman cars, which had been designed for comfort and climate control, now held the passengers inside. The water was coming in through the floors.

Forty-nine people died in Custer Creek that night. Another seventy-five were injured. The rescuers who arrived in the hours before dawn worked in the water, in the dark, cutting through steel and glass to reach the people trapped in the inverted compartments. They could hear them. Some of them were still alive when the rescuers got there. Some were not.

The Interstate Commerce Commission investigated and concluded that the cause was the flooding, not any failure of maintenance or inspection. The bridge had been examined and reinforced before the accident. An eastbound freight had crossed it safely just hours before the Olympian arrived. The ICC was correct in its narrow finding. The flooding was unprecedented. The bridge had been built to standards appropriate for the country and the era.

What the ICC did not say, because it was not asked to say it, was that the Milwaukee Road had been in bankruptcy since 1925 and had been cutting maintenance budgets on its Pacific Extension for a decade. Passenger traffic had fallen from sixteen million riders in 1920 to six and a half million by 1930, and the railroad had responded by deferring non-essential expenditures on the exposed prairie segments of its line, where seasonal creeks crossed under bridges built for a drier world. The bridge over Custer Creek had been inspected. It had not been reinforced against what a single night of rain could do to the clay country of southeastern Montana.

The Olympian continued to run after 1938, though it never recovered its prewar ridership. The Milwaukee Road continued its long decline, filing for its second bankruptcy in 1977 and abandoning its Pacific Extension entirely in 1980. The grade across eastern Montana was pulled up and the right-of-way sold, and the land went back to the ranchers and the grass.

Custer Creek is still there, ten miles southwest of Terry, still running dry most of the year. The badlands formations stand above it in the same configuration they occupied in 1938. There is no bridge now. There is no railroad. In a wet June, the creek can still rise twenty feet in a night.

See also

• Custer Creek train wreck, Prairie County, Montana
• Milwaukee Road, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad
• The Olympian, Milwaukee Road transcontinental passenger train