THANKS TO ONGOING EFFORTS BY RANDY DUNSON, PLANS ARE IN PLACE TO HAVE A HISTORICAL MARKER PLACED IN TOLAR. THE MARKER WILL COMMEMORATE THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE TOLAR MUNITIONS EXPLOSION AND SHOULD BE INSTALLED BY NOVEMBER 30TH. HOPEFULLY THERE WILL BE SOME TYPE OF DEDICATION CEREMONY....RANDY DUNSON, YOU DID GOOD! ACCOUNT OF THE TOLAR MUNITIONS EXPLOSION ARTICLE BY RANDY DUNSON (FSHS CLASS OF 1967) America had been involved in World War II for almost three years when the war was brought much closer to home Nov. 30, 1944. Residents of eastern New Mexico had read of the bombing of London, Paris and the rest of Europe, but on that fateful Thursday the terror of war was brought into their own front yard. The instrument of destruction was not an enemy bomber flying overhead - it was a westbound Santa Fe freight train. The train originated in Kansas City and was bound for the west coast. Just east of Amarillo, at the Pantex Ordnance Plant, the train picked up car CN476931. This was a box car loaded with 160 five hundred pound bombs destined for Japan through courtesy of the US Army Air Corps This would be a full bomb load for four B29 bombers. At Clovis, the Pecos Division crew climbed aboard. On steam locomotive 5002 were locomotive engineer B.L. Clark, fireman J. Worley and brakeman Jack Miller who was making his first trip on the Santa Fe. Conductor Darry Winn and brakeman J..J. Johnson rode the caboose. It was cold and windy as they started westward. There was nothing unusual about their train that morning. The 81 cars contained a variety of goods destined for the war in the Pacific - such things as bottled beer, salted peanuts, canned meat, airplane engines, bales of cotton, fuel oil, steel bars and various other materials. At Krider, section foreman H.W. Southard and his six men huddled beside an embankment eating their lunch out of the cold wind. Normally, section gangs posted a man on both sides of the track to inspect passing trains for overheated “The train slipped up on us as the wind was blowing so hard,” Southard said. “I didn’t get a man on the opposite side, but we all stood up and watched the train go by at about 45 mph. We observed indications of a hot box on a car near the head end. As the rear of the train came by I gave them a hot box signal, holding my fingers to my nose and pointed ahead. A member of the crew on the caboose acknowledged it.” As the train rounded the curve east of Tolar brakeman Jack Miller also saw the car smoking. He yelled to Clark, “Bill, we have a hot box or a brake sticking.” Clark eased off the throttle of the 5002 and began to set the brakes. Before the train could stop, the journal burned off of the seventh car, a tank car containing fuel oil. This allowed an arch bar to drop onto the track. As the car went over the east house track switch it derailed along with the 36 cars behind it, including the car of bombs. The locomotive and the head six cars drifted several hundred yards down the track before coming to a stop. The time was 12:08 p.m. Before the lunch hour was over every building in Tolar would be damaged or destroyed. Almost immediately the fuel oil caught on fire. Everyone in Tolar either heard the derailment or saw the smoke from the fire and ran to the door to see what was going on. Clark sent the head brakeman to flag down traffic on the highway. Johnson, rear brakeman, went back to flag against following trains. Winn walked up to investigate. At the phone booth he called the dispatcher, telling him to send an engine to pull the rear of the train away from the fire. He said, “I walked up the side of the train, scraping my shoulders against the cars trying to avoid the heat as much as I could. I was going to try to uncouple the rear of the train so we could save some of the cars.” At the time most of the cars were of wooden construction. The residents of Tolar watched Winn make his way toward the fire. Winn could hear beer bottles exploding from the heat as he neared the derailment. When he was six cars from the wreckage, the bombs exploded, blowing him under the train. “I almost smothered to death - there was no air,” he said. C.A. Watkins, owner of Watkins store, and Jess Brown were watching from a distance of about fifty yards. When the bombs exploded a bomb fragment struck Brown in the head. He died enroute to the hospital in Melrose, leaving a widow and eight children. Miraculously, Watkins escaped injury. Mrs. Watkins, who was inside the store, said, “crepe paper saved my life.” Just before the explosion, she had gone to the front of the store to arrange a crepe paper display. When the explosion occurred, a 1,500 pound axle assembly from one of the derailed cars whirled through the air, smashed through the roof of the store, spun across the floor and crashed out through the wall. She did receive a minor head injury when she got excited and jumped through the front window. The crepe paper display was in the only part of the store where the roof did not collapse. Despite the cold weather, Mrs. F.G. Forrest, 83, was watching from the front porch of her home near the schoolhouse. The blast blew her front door off the hinges and she and the door were blown back into the house together. Other than being “scared to death,” she was uninjured. Mrs. H.W. Smith, Postmistress, and A.C. Cash were watching from the step of the Smith Grocery and Post Office. The blast sent them sprawling to the ground. Passing motorists also received quite a thrill. Darry Winn said, “As I recall, there was one old cowboy in a Chevy. He told me the explosion spun his car around in the highway and blew out all four tires.” The suction from the blast literally pulled out all of the windows in another automobile. Fire chief Wayne West received injuries when the blast overturned his car about a half mile from Tolar. Another motorist said that after he got his car under control, he looked back in his rear view mirror and saw a car rolling. He went back to see if the driver needed help. The driver was crawling out of the back seat. He remarked, “That was some explosion.” Peanuts and corned beef were scattered over a wide area. On the back porch of a ranch house about a half mile away, a gallon of corned beef was found without a scratch on it. Most of a metal boxcar was blown onto the highway. Two cars contained cotton mattresses which were blown into small pieces. Winn commented, “The pieces looked to be several hundred feet up in the sky. Each piece was floating down and smoking. They looked like little stars on fire.” Clark recalled, “we had a carload of new airplane engines on the train and I remember seeing one of them fly directly over my head,” he said. “I don’t know if it was the same one or not, but several days later they found one of the engines in a field over a mile away.” Clovis and Ft. Sumner Army Air Fields sent firefighters to the scene but the intense heat was too much for them. The destruction was unbelievable. The blast left a crater 22 feet deep and 66 feet across. Four spans of telephone lines were twisted and tangled. Five hundred feet of track was gone. After the excitement abated, a member of the train crew found Winn’s cap almost buried in the dirt beside the tracks. It had a piece of iron in it about the size of a baseball. Winn said that when he finally returned to his caboose he found that the explosion sucked part of the face of the air gauge into the air hose. “For about a month after that I pulled little pieces of thread out of the skin of my stomach,” Winn said “I don’t know where they came from of how they got there but the explosion somehow embedded them in the flesh.” Brakeman Johnson, at the rear of the train, was blown to the ground when the blast occurred but, miraculously, the entire train crew escaped serious injury. When Mrs. Brown returned to her home she found a heavy chunk of metal had crashed through the roof and was now in an easy chair. Though every building in Tolar suffered major damage, two factors contributed to the lack of casualties. First, most of Tolar’s 30 residents were out of town. Some, including Mrs. Brown, had gone to Melrose to shop and do laundry. The school children were in neighboring Taiban due to the school consolidation, so no one was in the school building when it was demolished. Second, with the exception of Mrs. Watkins, all of the residents had stepped outside to watch the fire and were not trapped in their homes when windows were blown out and roofs collapsed. The blast was felt and heard for many miles around, even as far away as Hereford, Texas, some 120 miles distant. Doors and windows were rattled in Clovis. The shock was felt in Portales, N.M. Dishes rattled in Farwell, N.M. Windows broke in Melrose and Forrest. Dishes were shaken off the shelves in the Elida Hotel. Boys working on a combine near Floyd said the ground literally shook beneath them. On the lighter side, one lady said she got a cold as a result of the explosion. Mrs. J.F. Harris, who lived about a half mile from the scene, had the only working telephone after the blast. She said that besides having no windows in her house, she was being constantly roused from her sleep by the numerous telephone inquiries concerning the explosion. This was all making her cold much worse. Many thought the air field at Clovis had been bombed. Others thought a plane had crashed. One thing is certain -those who experienced the explosion in any way remember it vividly. Sheriff Bob Whitley, deputy sheriff Charlie Witherspoon (the author’s uncle) and district attorney Dick Rowley, along with FBI officers, went to investigate the accident. Conductor Winn was questioned by the FBI on five occasions. Rumors of sabotage surfaced but they were completely unfounded. The most interesting conspiracy theory was that the explosion was staged by the government to divert attention from the top secret atomic bomb blast which had occurred earlier in the year. Grim reminders of that day are still evident. It doesn’t take much searching to find small pieces of the bombs still laying on the ground. Pieces of twisted metal are still evident among the ruins of Tolar. On that day, the people of Tolar and eastern New Mexico saw first hand the devastation of a war in their homeland. One commented, “So this is what war means. This is only a small portion of damage in the eyes of people who have undergone bombings for years.” Another added, “Broken homes have been able to testify to the desolation and heartbreak that has followed our entrance into the war. But on Thursday, this vicinity felt also the destruction of property that accompanies war.” This was the second hot box mishap for Winn at Tolar. Shortly after he joined the railroad in 1922, he was the head brakeman on a westbound freight train. Spotting a hot box, the engineer stopped so Winn could go back and check it. It was a pitch dark night and the engine crew did not realize that they had stopped on top of the high bridge near the east siding switch at Tolar. In those days the bridge did not have any walkway or guardrails. When brakeman Winn stepped off of the engine he fell some eighty feet. Miraculously, he landed between the pilings and escaped with a broken back. For six months he laid on a board in the kitchen of the family dugout near Grier. After that, Winn always said, “If I can just get past Tolar, I’ve got it made.” Randy Dunson, Clovis locomotive engineer, authored this true story. Dunson wrote similar articles for a former newsletter, the Pecos Division’s Pecos Handbill. His work will be featured in future Southwest Express newsletters.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 16:53:09 +0000