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1977-1981
 
Public Relations and Advertising Department
Windsor Station Montreal Que. H3C 3E4
 

Volume 7   Number 15

Nov. 23, 1977


ESP Gave Staysko the Edge on Fate

By Nicholas Morant

Engineer's "funny feelings" helped avert derailments.
 
 Andy Staysko
 
The dictionary describes "supernatural" as:  "Something beyond ordinary operation of cause and effect", or:  "Something due to or manifesting some agency beyond the forces of nature".
 
There are some people who are gifted with psychic powers, call them "extra sensory perceptionists" if you wish. I knew such a person once upon a time. She was hardly the popular picture of the turbaned charlatan, seated before the glass globe in a circus tent backgrounded by signs of the zodiac.
 
She was a young woman of great charm and many abilities and worked with me at the Banff Springs Hotel for several seasons as a public relations assistant.
 
One day she told me I was going to have an accident. My wife would not be with me, but I would be accompanied by a man about twice my age. She thought it might occur on a mountain trail and warned me to keep a sharp look out for myself at all times.
 
She was right. Less than three weeks later, Christian Haesler (twice my age at that time), a Canadian Pacific Hotels' Swiss mountain guide, and myself, working on assignment, tangled with a grizzly bear. During the six months I was in and out of hospital I had good cause to recall her warning. More so when Haesler died as a result of the accident a year later.
 
Sometime later, when I visited this lady in Toronto, she was to tell me that she "felt" there was to be an accident as described but she admitted she never sensed that a bear would be involved. Rather, she explained:  "I assumed the logical accident on a trail would be getting kicked by a packhorse".
 
Perceptive Abilities
 
In my first article, I mentioned Andy Staysko, retired engineman, now living in Lethbridge, who related some of the events concerning the Phantom Train at Medicine Hat. Whilst interviewing him, I discovered he has enjoyed, over the years, certain perceptive abilities which the rest of us are denied.
 
"I was engineer on the 3091 standing at Magrath, Alberta, in June 1925, my conductor was Peter Johnson and we had just finished switching a few cars when he came up to the engine to see about our next move", he said.
 
(In those days there was one siding between Magrath and Spring Coulee to the west. This was Bradshaw and the train orders showed it was full of cars.)
 
Johnson suggested to Andy they should go for the meet with the Cardston local passenger at Spring Coulee. Andy looked at his watch and figured they had an hour and 13 minutes. Normal running time then was 35 minutes.
 
"Something told me I'd best sit where we were at Magrath", he recalled. "I said to the conductor:  Peter, if you fellas don't mind, I've a funny feeling we should stop where we are and wait on that passenger"!
 
The conductor made it easy for him:  "It's up to you my boy, we'll just back her off the main and wait"!
 
This they did, but the train never showed and, since it was not reported running late, Johnson set up his telephone and soon learned from the dispatcher that a small trestle over an irrigation canal had been undermined by beaver and collapsed. Fortunately, the section gang had discovered it and flagged down the passenger train minutes before it was due to cross.
 
Had Andy Staysko tried to run for the meet he might well have dumped his locomotive 18 feet into 12 feet of water.
 
"To this day", said Andy, "I don't know what got into me"!
 
But he remembered the words of Fred Bryan, engineman on the passenger, whilst talking with Superintendent C.D. McIntosh about the incident.
 
"Andy", said Fred, "If you live up to those hunches you should be alive a long time"!
 
On another occasion, Andy Staysko was engineman on a mixed train between Consul and Val Marie, Sask. in 1934, with Fred Connolly firing. It was springtime and there was considerable run-off from the long winter's snow. At one point along the line he encountered a section crew with a track motor and asked the foremen if he'd been patrolling the area just recently.
 
When the answer was no, Andy's old ESP mechanism started ticking and again came the premonition of trouble. So he backed his freight and let the section crew go ahead to "pilot" them. Two and a half miles east of Frontier, on a slight curve, there were the section men frantically waving their arms like so many windmills. A badger had bored a hole beside a culvert and the spring run-off had undermined the entire fill. When Andy stopped his train he found the tracks hanging 13 feet off the ground for a distance of a full car length.
 
It is interesting to note that when Engineer Andrew Staysko retired he had 65 merit marks to his credit, so it would appear this mysterious gift served him in good stead over the 48 years 8 months he worked in railroading.


This CP Rail News article is copyright 1977 by Canadian Pacific Railway and is reprinted here with their permission. All photographs, logos, and trademarks are the property of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.

 
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