In front of engine 1309 and this train the water played one of its most fantastic tricks with the rails. The débris of trees, logs, planks, and every description of wreckage is heaped up in front of the engine to the headlight, and is packed in so tightly that twenty men with ropes and axes worked all day without clearing all away. The track is absolutely gone from the front of the engine clear up to beyond Conemaugh. Parts of it lie about everywhere, twisted into odd shapes, turned upside down, stacked crosswise one above the other, and in one place a section of the west track has been lifted clear over the right track, runs along there for a ways, and then twists back into its proper place. Even stranger are the tricks the water has played with the rails where they have been torn loose from the ties. The rails are steel and of the heaviest weight used. They were twisted as easily as willow branches in a spring freshet in a country brook. One rail lies in the sand in the shape of a letter "S." More are broken squarely in two. Many times rails have been broken within a few feet of a fishplate, coupling them to the next rail, and the fragments are still united by the comparatively weak plates. Every natural law would seem to show that the first place where they should have broken was at the joints. There is little to indicate the recent presence of a railroad in the stretch from this spot up to the upper part of Conemaugh. The little plain into which the gap widened here, and in which stood the bulk of the town, is wiped out. The river has changed its course from one side of the valley to the other. There is not the slightest indication that the central part of the plain was ever anything but a flood-washed gulch in some mountain region. At the upper end of the plain, surrounded by a desert of mud and rock, stands a fantastic collection of ruined railroad equipments. Three trains stood there when the flood swept down the valley. On the outside was a local passenger train with three cars and a locomotive. It stands there yet, the cars tilted by the washing of the tracks, but comparatively uninjured. Somehow a couple more locomotives have been run into the sand bank. In the centre a freight train stood on the track, and a large collection of smashed cars has its place now. It was broken all to pieces. Inside of all was the day express, with its baggage and express cars, and at the end three vestibule cars. It was from this train that a number of passengers--fifteen certainly, and no one knows how many more--were lost. When the alarm came most of the passengers fled for the high ground. Many reached it; others hesitated on the way, tried to run back to the cars, and were lost. Others stayed on the cars, and, after the first rush of the flood, were rescued alive. Some of the freight cars were loaded with lime, and this leaped over the vestibule cars and set them on fire. All three of the vestibule cars were burned down to the trucks.