Great Northern Train Narrowly Escapes Destruction
Passengers on a Great Northern train watched in horror as thousands of tons of earth wiped out a work site just feet from their tracks.
The story, cleaned up
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According to reports brought to Tacoma, passengers on a Great Northern coast train had a narrow escape from injury or death Thursday afternoon. The train had reached a point about five miles south of Mukilteo when a landslide took place. Where the slide occurred, the bank on one side of the track is between 150 and 200 feet high, and on the other side the ground slopes abruptly down to the Sound. About 3 o'clock, when the train was coming around the curve, workmen noticed the bottom of the hill moving. Before the locomotive could be uncoupled, thousands of tons of earth, boulders, and trees came down the hillside. The engineer saw the slide coming and brought the train to a stop within a few feet of where the earth covered the track. John Kerrer, who lives at 1207 South Sixteenth Street, was on the train and said that when the passengers looked out and saw how narrowly they had missed being in the slide, some were almost prostrated.
“Thousands of tons of earth and boulders and great trees came down the hillside and carried everything before it.”
Railway routes along the Puget Sound bluffs remain notoriously unstable. This account of a near-catastrophic slide near Mukilteo highlights the ongoing environmental risks that have shaped Pacific Northwest rail infrastructure for over a century.
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