Question about Virginian Class AE operations following Clarks Gap electrification

Sun Aug 2 11:25:34 EDT 2015

I also knew Clyde and spoke to him the same week he passed away.  He gave me a great account of the night the 800 blew up between Stewartsville and Goodview.  He said he spoke to the young fireman the night when he gave the orders.  After the "wreck", and before he knew what had actually happened (low water), word got back to JK where Clyde worked, and he thought that maybe he had given the wrong orders.  "I searched the trash and everywhere for any evidence that I had maybe made a mistake."  Also he told me that he went to the wreck scene the next day observing a grisly scene!
Skip Salmon
---- NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> wrote: 

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I was fortunate to have known Clyde Weatherly; he was a great educator and passed along his knowledge with great good humor.  I went back to see  him after he’d retired, and recorded some of his experiences one of which made a great story in Classic Trains.

He taught me a lot about train orders which became useful later in my career.  I owe him . . .

EdKing

From: NW Mailing List via NW-Mailing-List
Sent: Saturday, August 01, 2015 8:57 PM
To: NW Mailing List
Cc: NW Mailing List
Subject: Re: Question about Virginian Class AE operations following Clarks Gap electrification

Ed,

I was hanging out at JK, perhaps a decade after you were there, and Mr. Weatherly told me the same story. He also drove to the site of the blow-up after getting off duty that morning. The sights he saw that morning would raise the hair on the necks of the hardiest of men.

A true tragedy of the rails.

Jeff Sanders

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From: NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
To: NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 1, 2015 7:56 AM
Subject: Re: Question about Virginian Class AE operations following Clarks Gap electrification

The late Clyde Weatherly was working at JK Tower that morning and handed up 800’s orders, caught by the head brakeman.  Clyde told me that the engineer had his head down as if already asleep.  The fireman was a brand new man who fired it on the westbound trip and tried to lay off the eastbound; he didn’t think he could handle it, but there was nobody to relieve him.

EdKing

From: NW Mailing List via NW-Mailing-List
Sent: Friday, July 31, 2015 4:17 PM
To: nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org
Cc: NW Mailing List
Subject: Re: Question about Virginian Class AE operations following Clarks Gap electrification

Following is from the ICC Report regardingthe April 1, 1941 boiler explosion of AEEng 800 at Stewartsville.  Keep in mind thatthe information is only one example. "The train consisted of 150 cars of coal andcaboose, the weight of the train was 13,479 tons.That weight is an estimate.  In the era beforeweigh-in-motion scales, loads were weighed justbefore dumping. Clerks used an arbitrary tareweight (24 tons usually. but 22 tons on theSouthern) and computed the loaded weight basedon the number of 50 ton cars and the numberof "battleship" gons to calculate the estimatedtonnage.Extra 800 East departed Roanoke at 4:10 a.m.the AE exploded at about 5:20 a.m. --  12.7miles in 1 hour 10 minutes. Typical ?                          Harry Bundy
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SKIP SALMON