On a recent Saturday, it was 28 degrees and the cold day was standing still. White clouds were parked on a blue sky. If there were birds in the bushes, they weren't saying. The moment was as quiet as the snow lying on County Road 321/2 where it crosses the train track - about eight miles north of Mandan near Highway 1806.

Just south of Harmon Village - scattered rural homes on small acreages near where the little town of Harmon once was.

If there was chaos in the world, this wouldn't be the spot. Not this day.

But there was on that other day, 55 years ago.

On a Monday afternoon, Jan. 15, 1951, it was 28 degrees. Same spot. But things weren't quiet. A train was whistling a warning. Itstrain engineer frantically tried to get another train's attention.

Two Northern Pacific Railroad trains were coming from opposite directions, about to have a head-on collision.

A Northern Pacific historian, Bill Kuebler, of Minnesota, said in a recent interview it would be the last steam engine head-on collision for Northern Pacific, which was converting to diesel engines.

In this last one, someone would die: Billy B. Rogers, 28, an Army Air Force veteran who had served in Alaska, had come home to Glendive, Mont., to raise a family and farm, and just recently had been trained as a fireman for the Northern Pacific. He was on the southbound train.

His son, Michael Rogers, of Worden, Mont. - now 59, then age 5 - said recently he doesn't want the train tragedy forgotten and is working toward getting a historical monument placed near the site.

Andy Mork, 84, hasn't forgotten.

"It was a beautiful, clear sunny day," said Mork, of Mandan, who was there that day. He was cutting down ash trees for fence posts with two friends - Don and Bevan Shaw - in the family woods about a half-mile east of the train track.

If there was something to hear, they could hear it. "You could hear things for miles and miles," Mork said.

And they started to hear something, the "chuffing" of a steam locomotive.

"We heard two trains,"said Don Bevan, 75, in a recent interview. "One was 'chuffing' away from the south, the other from the north."

When two trains were heading toward each other in that area, typically they're able to pass each other without incident because one train would switch so the other train could enter the side track at Harmon and continue traveling. But the tree-cutting trio noticed that things didn't sound right. The "chuffing"wasn't slowing.

Mork remembers someone mentioning, "Hey, those trains aren't stopping."

Joe Wirtz, of Mandan, the engineer on the Northern Pacific train heading south, knew he was supposed to stop at the switch, according to an investigative report.

But, at Harmon, the track maintenance crew noticed that Wirtz's train was not stopping and tried to flag the train down, only to get a "hi, fellows" type wave from Wirtz.

Wirtz would later report that the reason he overshot the switch by 2,009 feet, giving the other train nowhere to escape, was that he was helping Rogers, a new railroad employee, who was having trouble maintaining adequate steam pressure.

Instead of stopping the train first, and then helping Rogers, Wirtz let the train continue as he assisted Rogers, Michael Rogers said. If he had followed railroad regulations, he should have stopped the train first and then helped Rogers, knowing that there was a switch stop approaching at Harmon, Wirtz acknowledged in written testimony taken during the accident's investigation.

Michael Rogers said it was his dad's first solo trip after his student trips, but it was difficult for anyone to keep a good fire going when using lignite coal.

"It's tough to have a good fire when burning dirt,"he said.

According to text from the Interstate Commerce Commission's investigation of the matter, Wirtz said it didn't occur to him that his train was closely approaching the meeting point with the other train, and he didn't sound the engine-whistle signal for the meeting point.

The northbound train spotted him, however.

The crew on the northbound train became concerned when they saw Wirtz's train hadn't stopped short of the switch. So the engineer on the northbound put on the brakes and sounded a warning whistle. The northbound's fireman then alighted from the train and ran toward the approaching train, giving stop signals.

Wirtz, after shaking the grates and raking and leveling the fire, "leaned across his seat box with his head out of the window to recover from his exertions," according to the commission's report.

Wirtz saw a person a short distance from his engine giving stop signals, and Wirtz immediately put on the emergency brake, according to a commission's report.

Michael Rogers said Wirtz then did a swan dive out the window, an 8- to 10-foot drop, to get away from the train.

"He hadn't hit the ground when the two engines hit,"Rogers said.

The crew on the other train also had jumped off the train and was fine, in part because of a relatively soft landing into snow banks, Mork said. In Wirtz's train, most of the crew made it out - including Wirtz and the brakeman located above the coal and water storage area, called the tender.

But one didn't. Michael Rogers said the weight of the train's load, 3,717 tons of coal in 51 cars, moving at 25 mph, pushed the tender into the engine's cab and crushed his dad.

"Why he was still in there, it bothers me, and I don't know if I'll ever find the answer,"Rogers said.

Mork and the Shaw brothers, after hearing the huge "boom" of the collision, got on a tractor and headed across the fields to the wreck.

"It was eerie,"Mork said. The whistle from the northbound train continued to blow the rest of the day until the steam was gone, "a mournful sound reminding us that a death of a young man had happened."

It would take a couple of hours for Wirtz's locomotive, with its steam pipes broken, to cool down enough for the ambulance crew to get inside to remove Rogers. Don Shaw, who helped carry Rogers out, remembers thinking Rogers was wearing white gloves when it was actually just the condition of his skin from being "cooked" in the cab by the high pressure steam from the broken pipes. The funeral record lists cause of death as a crushed chest.

Kuebler said he plans to locate and read Wirtz's personnel file to find out if he was penalized for the accident.

Michael Rogers said his family died the day his dad died.

"This is a wreck that destroyed a family,"he said.

At the time of the accident, Rogers was living with his grandparents at their farm east of Glendive, where his dad grew up. Rogers said not much was explained to him about why he was living with his grandparents. He said there had been marital and other problems between his mom and dad.

After his dad's death, he remained with his grandparents. His mother, raised in California, left the family, and his three siblings were adopted out. His sister is somewhere in California, a brother is wandering around in Billings, Mont., and the other brother disappeared years ago, he said.

His grandmother died when he was about 7, and he was raised by a grandfather who gave him the job of caring for the ranch's herd of 1,500 sheep. At age 19, he left for the military, following in his dad's footsteps.

Michael Rogers, who is disabled because of degenerative arthritis, said it was about six months ago that he finally decided he needed to find out more about his father. He doesn't even have anything of his father's.

He located his father's surviving sibling, an aunt, Beverly Thornton, of Seattle. She recently wrote letters to Michael Rogers describing how Billy, 8 years older than she, saved her life when she was 7 and drowning in a river during a family picnic. And how he wanted to learn to fly so badly. He would spend hours reading aviation magazines and as a kid made wings out of narrow boards, newspaper and tissue paper and broke them trying unsuccessfully to flap and fly off a big hill.

"He was so full of life,"she wrote. He didn't even like to sleep, because it was a waste of time. She remembers he read a lot, was well-informed, and a favorite topic of conversation for him was science, atoms, the universe. She remembers he was always saying or doing something to make people laugh. When she didn't have money for a 35-cent movie ticket, he threw her $5. "He was good to everyone,"she said.

On Oct. 14, a friend drove Michael Rogers to the crash site. He stood on the exact spot. He wanted to get closure.

"I still don't feel that. Whatever closure is, I don't know," he said.

He wrote in an e-mail that his dad died moving coal that may have heated someone's house and kept their children warm in the winter, or generated the electricity that lighted a home so a mom could cook a nice dinner.

"Will he be remembered for all he did for all of those people?" he asks.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at vgrantier@;bismarcktribune.com.)