When the engines reached what felt like five miles an hour, Ray hit the release lever for the hydraulics. As soon as he saw that the Claw was dropping, he immediately hopped off the Claw assembly’s small forward platform and tumbled to the ground beside the tracks.
After gouging the top of the ties for the first thirty feet, the Claw finally bit down and caught beneath the ties. It immediately began loudly snapping the ties, one after another, with ferocity. They were amazed to see that instead of slowing down, the trio of engines continued to accelerate. The noise was tremendous.
As the engines approached seven miles an hour, Alan leaped from the bottom step of the front stairs of the forwardmost engine and rolled down the ballast. He banged his right knee in the process. Just as the old man regained his feet, the Claw came ripping past him, sending shards of creosote-impregnated tie wood and a spray of ballast rocks painfully against his legs.
His son walked up to him and they stood side-by-side, watching the destruction of the tracks ahead of them in the moonlight and listening to the cacophony of the uneven rending and snapping of ties. It sounded like an enormous deck of cards being shuffled. All of this was accompanied by the roar of the three engines. As the ballast rocks were shattered and struck each other, they threw off a strange blue-green brisance that formed a halo-like glow around the Claw. The Claw itself had already heated up so much that it started throwing sparks as well.
As the noisy contraption drew farther away, Ray shook his father’s hand and shouted, “Well, Dad, you’ve really done it this time. You are the Master of Disaster.”
Back at the Guyot shop building, there was the sound of rending steel and the whine and clanking of the overhead crane that had just destroyed its own undercarriage and one corner of the building.
Ray supported Alan McGregor as he hobbled back to where the Claw had first dug in. The gash between the rails behind them was tremendous. Both rails were tipped up at a thirty-degree angle, and chunks of broken ties stuck up at odd angles. They were startled to see that at the transition between the undisturbed ties and those that had been broken, the rails were each literally twisted outward almost forty-five degrees.
Stan’s pickup came up alongside them on the wayside service road. Stan shouted, “Hop in, guys! If we stay here, we’ll be in a world of hurt.”
Alan slowly reached the door of the truck, and Ray helped him get in.
In the aftermath, the distance that The Claw had traveled amazed everyone. Even their most optimistic predictions were for the destruction of ten to fifteen miles of track before it either fell apart or came off the rails. But the contraption continued, ripping up tracks relentlessly. From a distance it looked like an enormous zipper had been opened. After reaching a speed of twenty-seven miles per hour on level ground, the apparatus slowed to just twelve miles per hour on some of the steepest grades. With the tremendous power of the engines, the Claw still motored on, mile after mile. Finally, after ripping up the track for almost fifty-eight miles, the growing heat and cumulative fatigue of the steel in the Claw became too great. Now glowing deep orange along its full length and bright yellow at its notch, the Claw finally sheared away, leaving the lower portion embedded in the ballast.
The three engines picked up speed after that. By the time they passed through Vanderhoof, they were going sixty miles per hour. Two miles west, the trio was up to 105 miles per hour and ran off the rails when they came to a sharp left-hand curve, just past the Highway 27 overcrossing. All three engines and the Claw assembly came to rest in a surprisingly neat row. It was only after the engines had tipped over that mercury safety switches triggered relays to shut down the electric motors and diesel engine units.
When the first PLA officers arrived at the scene of the wreck, they found that the broad top rim of the Claw’s counterweight box had been emblazoned with raised beads from an arc welder. They read NLR! on both sides, BEWARE THE CRAW! on the forward rim, and DEFILE YOUR ANCESTORS TO THE EIGHTEENTH GENERATION on the back rim.
In the aftermath of the Claw’s track sabotage, it was estimated that 57.8 miles of track were rendered useless and that 173,400 ties had been snapped in half. Most of the rail was badly bent—particularly on curves—so that it could not be reused. Since nearly all of the rail had been welded together, it would have to be cut into sections before it could be removed and replaced.
The enormous length of unzipped track was the most beautiful mess that Alan McGregor had ever seen.
The escape of the Guyot shop families was nerve-racking, but successful. In the hours preceding the Claw’s track sabotage, the employees spent several hours destroying the big lathes and the shop’s other heavy equipment with cutting torches. Then all of them except Larry went home to their families to prepare for their imminent departure.
They had already rigged the crane to self-destruct. The crane had tremendous lifting force available. It was fairly simple to pay out all two hundred feet of cable, loop three wraps of the end of the cable around the crane’s own T-shaped wheeled undercarriage, and then connect the snatch block to the I-beam post at the northwest corner of the building.
The original plan was to somehow replace the crane’s momentary on-off switch with a continuously on switch. But since the combined skills in the shop were more mechanical than electrical, they opted instead for the expedient of fabricating a clamp that would hold the green Lift button fully depressed.
As soon as Larry Guyot heard Alan toot the train’s horn, he triggered the crane Lift button, affixing it in the fully depressed position with the clamp fixture. The slow, high-torque crane began pulling in the nearly two hundred feet of slack cable as Larry ran for his car. He had already accelerated his Dodge to forty-five miles per hour and was a half mile down the road when the cable finally pulled taut. The gantry crane then folded itself in half and collapsed the front of the building. When the snatch block reached the motor housing, the tremendous force of the motor snapped the steel cable. The stub end of the cable in the cable housing made a loud “thunk” once every four seconds, until the motor was finally turned off by the first fireman to arrive at the crumpled building.
The charter bus was idling and had its door open when Larry pulled up. They heard a siren in the distance. He jumped out of his Dodge and leaped aboard the bus, and it started to roll forward even before the hydraulic door had completely closed. Larry’s brother was at the wheel of the bus. He was wearing an N95 respirator.
Larry’s wife, wearing a nurse’s uniform and also wearing an N95 respirator, gave him a hug. The families cheered as the bus rolled out toward the Yellowhead Highway.
They carried with them two forged letters that were designed to get them past PLA checkpoints on their intended route. The first letter was an official-looking document that certified that the passengers onboard the bus were residents of Olway (just west of Prince George) who were quarantined H7N9 influenza patients being transported to an infectious disease ward at the seven-hundred-bed Foothills Medical Centre, in Calgary.
Just as they hoped, the mere sight of the mask-wearing nurse and the words influenza and quarantine were enough to get the guards at two highway checkpoints to quickly wave the bus through.
From Prince George the bus drove six hours southeast to the Highway 11 junction. Once they were there, the respirators and the nurse’s uniforms were hidden, and the second letter was readied. They stopped briefly to switch the license plates on the bus.