Ogden Daily Standard | 1918-11-23 | Page 9 | Soldier Boy from Ogden is in Train Wreck

SOLDIER BOY FROM OGDEN IS 1 TRAIN' WRECK J It isn't always necessary for a soldier sol-dier to be in tho front line trenches to get scares and narrow escapes in the middle of the night, according to Howard How-ard J. Stratford, a former well-known Ogden boy, now stationed at Camp Eustus, Virginia. In a letter to Thomas R. Roes, another an-other prominent Ogdenite, now serving at Washington, Stratford relates an experience which occurred on the troop train on which he was going to Camp Eustus from Camp Stevens, Ore. An extract from the letter, tells the Interesting episode as follows: "Did you hear that we all came almost al-most taking a trip to the Happy Hunting Hunt-ing Ground? Our train was wrecked just outside of Charleston, West Va., and for a minute we thought It was "all night" with us, yet we are an exceedingly ex-ceedingly lucky bunch in pulling through the way we did. No one was hurt, not even scratched. The worst feature of the wreck was that one of the follows lost his pipe. "Well to go back to the story we were clipping along at 45 miles per hour when all of a sudden she jumped the track, due to a little piece of rail being broken. All the cars but the first two went off the track and when the engineer finally got the train stopped she stood at an angle of 45 degrees. Our car was pretty badly wrecked, in fact the whole train had" to be rigged up at Charleston before we could re-j re-j sume our journey. I "Maybe you think we weren't some scared bunch during the few minutes thp cars went zigzagging and swaying over the ties. Yet the amount of calmness calm-ness and level-headedness the boys showed was remarkable. J , 'Had tho accident happened just a few hundred yards farther on, it would j have proved very disastrous. We can thank our lucky stars it came out as it did we lost the bigger part of a good night's sleep, however." oo