In a railroad career spanning more than 40 years, Harry Hendricks can remember an unexpected assignment. It was the day his freight train became an improvised ambulance.
Hendricks is among the people involved in a new museum exhibit that highlights the history of railroads in this region. A few days ago, while the display was being set up at Vancouver’s historic train depot, he had a chance to look back on his own railroading history.
The Vancouver man was a conductor on a Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway freight train back in the mid-1950s, working the Vancouver-Wishram run.
It was a day when roads along the Columbia River Gorge were closed because of a winter storm, and Hendricks was getting ready for the 111-mile trip back to Vancouver. Then the dispatcher called.
“A little girl is deathly ill and needs to go to the hospital in Portland,” Hendricks was told.
Heading west out of Wishram, Hendricks had the train stop at Bingen — about 70 miles from Vancouver — where the little girl, her mother and a nurse came aboard.
Since it was a freight train, the only place for passengers was the caboose.
Hendricks told the engineer to keep rolling west at a steady 25 mph until they made another stop at Stevenson to pick up more stranded people.
“We wound up with 17 people in the caboose. When we got to Vancouver, there was an ambulance waiting to meet us” so the girl could be transferred to the hospital.
“She was a neat little girl, about 10 years old,” Hendricks said.
He never did learn how her medical emergency turned out, but there likely was some high-level praying on her behalf.
One of the people they picked up in Stevenson was a priest who was traveling to Rome and had to get to Portland for his flight.
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