21 Years On The Erie Railroad

The very heavy snow fall we here in Pennsylvania had this past week-end reminds me of my first winter spent on the railroad. On December 12, 1944, snow began to fall about noon. I was still in high school, so it was no big deal to a high school student, except that visions of snow days crossed my mind.
When I went to work at 5:30 the next morning, there was 8 inches of heavy snow on the ground, and this snow continued until we had 21 inches of the stuff. School was cancelled, of course, since the buses couldn't run. That meant that I and my student buddy could work full time on the railroad until school re-started in a few days.
That was the day of railroad passenger trains, and the Erie had 6 of them daily, 3 eastbound and 3 westbound, plus 2 more that carried mail and express only, 1 eastbound and 1 westbound. There was a long (about 100 yards) black-top platform along side of the main track, where the passengers detrained. This platform had to be clean of snow and ice, which was our job during the blizzard. I can remember starting to shovel at the Main Street crossing, work east to the end of the platform, shoulder my shovel, walk back to the Main Street crossing, and start all over again.
Due to the heavy wide-spread snowfall, the New York Central Railroad, which at that time ran from New York City to Chicago, right along the Great Lakes, had to detour their main-line west-bound passenger trains from Buffalo, New York to Cleveland, Ohio over the Erie. We were amazed and excited to see the legendary trains of the Central; The Empire State Express, The 20th Century Limited, and others passing our station. I can remember the wonderful whistles of the New York Central steam engines, especially the 4-6-4 Hudson types. I think that the Central also had the new 4-8-4 Niagaras in stock, but am not sure. I also remember some of the Central freight trains also being detoured over the Erie, since this was war-time, and the freight had to be moved.
It was a three-day school vacation for my buddy and me. It was hard work, but pleasant.
A result of this snowfall was that Main Street of our little town developed two ruts in the heavy snow, since we didn't have any snow-clearing equipment to handle such a large snowfall. The standing joke at that time was that a stranger, finding his way into town, would ask "Which rut do I take to get out of this place?" That was more truth than fiction, since the ruts grew larger by the day, and if you didn't stay in your rut, you didn't go anywhere.
As I have mentioned before, Camp Reynolds was just a few miles down the road from our town. In, I believe, March of 1945, an engineer company stationed at the camp brought in its equipment, which included power shovels, bulldozers, etc., along with high-pressure water hoses, and cleaned up Main Street. We hadn't really seen the pavement since December 12 of 1944.