The train left Miami at 4:25 in the afternoon.
Two hours and twenty-five minutes had passed since the request reached the Florida East Coast Railway. The interval had been consumed by the logistics that a railroad requires to assemble an unscheduled special train on a holiday — locating a locomotive in the Miami yards, finding an engineer and a fireman and a conductor willing to make the run, coupling the passenger cars and boxcars that would carry the veterans back to the mainland. The interval was not the product of negligence. It was the product of a system operating at its normal pace on a day when its normal pace was slower than usual. The railway did not know that the storm approaching the Keys was the most intense hurricane in the modern record. The railway knew that an evacuation had been authorized and a train was required. It assembled the train and dispatched it.
The train headed south out of the Miami yards on the mainline toward Homestead.
The route was familiar to every engineer who had worked the Keys extension. South from Miami through the suburban fringe, past the agricultural country of the upper Redland, into Homestead where the single-track mainline met the Keys extension at the junction. At Homestead the locomotive would be repositioned — the single track required the engine to push the cars southbound rather than pull them, reversing the normal operating configuration — and the train would proceed south onto the Keys extension, crossing the bridges and causeways that carried the track over the shallow water between the mainland and the island chain.
Under normal conditions the run from Miami to Islamorada took approximately three hours. The conditions on September 2 were not normal and were deteriorating by the hour.
* * *
The first delay occurred at the Miami River drawbridge.
The bridge was raised for boat traffic — the holiday had brought pleasure boats onto the river, and the bridge operator was cycling the span on its normal schedule, unaware that the train approaching from the north was carrying the evacuation authority for seven hundred men on islands that a violent and still-intensifying hurricane was approaching. The train stopped. The engineer waited. The bridge closed. The train crossed. Minutes had been consumed, and each minute consumed by the train was a minute gained by the storm, which did not stop for drawbridges or boat traffic or the operational protocols that governed the movement of objects through the shared infrastructure of a coastal city on a holiday afternoon.
The train continued south toward Homestead.
At Homestead the locomotive was uncoupled, moved around the train on a siding, and coupled to the opposite end for the southbound push. The operation consumed additional time — the switching, the coupling, the brake test, the signal confirmation that the single-track line ahead was clear. The engineer had worked the Keys extension before. He knew the route. He knew the bridges. He knew the weather was building ahead of him and that the conditions on the Keys would be worse than what he was experiencing at Homestead, where the wind was strong but not yet dangerous and the rain was intermittent.
The train departed Homestead and entered the Keys extension.
The track ran south across the upper reaches of Barnes Sound, the first of the open-water crossings that punctuated the route between the mainland and the Matecumbe Keys. The bridge approaches were low — barely above the tidal range under normal conditions, and the conditions were no longer normal. The water was higher than the engineer had seen on previous runs. The wind was pushing against the cars from the northeast, loading them laterally in a way that the track’s alignment across open water made impossible to escape. The train was exposed. Every bridge, every causeway, every stretch of track that crossed water rather than land offered the wind a clear approach to the train’s broadside, and the cars — tall, flat-sided, presenting a substantial sail area to the crosswind — required the engineer to reduce speed to maintain stability on the rails.
The train slowed.
The storm did not.
* * *
Ahead of the train, on the Matecumbe Keys, the conditions had passed from deteriorating to dangerous.
The wind was at sustained hurricane force by late afternoon. The barometer had fallen below twenty-eight inches and was continuing its descent at a rate that told anyone who could read it that the storm’s center was close and closing. The water was rising on both sides of the narrow islands — Florida Bay water pushed by the northeast wind onto the western shores, Atlantic swells running onto the eastern shores from the southeast. The camp structures on Lower Matecumbe were beginning to fail — roofing peeled by the wind, walls flexing against the gusts, the sound of structural timber breaking audible between the wind’s sustained roar.
The veterans who had been told a train was coming waited in the camps and in whatever shelter the island offered. The strongest structures — the concrete construction of the camp headquarters, the more substantial buildings of the permanent Keys communities — were filling with people who had abandoned the shacks and temporary barracks that were obviously inadequate. Others sheltered behind the railroad embankment, pressing against the leeward side of the fill as the wind drove rain and debris horizontally across the islands.
The train was on the Keys extension, somewhere south of Homestead, pushing its cars against the northeast wind across bridges that were increasingly awash with surge and spray. The engineer could see the conditions ahead through the locomotive cab’s windows — the sky dark, the rain horizontal, the water on the roadbed rising with each bridge crossing. He could not see the men on the Matecumbe Keys, thirty miles ahead, who were waiting for the train he was bringing them. He could not see the barometer readings at Long Key, fifty miles ahead, where Duane was recording the approach of something beyond the advisory’s description. He could see only the track in front of him and the conditions through which the track ran, and the conditions were telling him that the run to Islamorada was going to be slower than anyone who had dispatched the train from Miami had anticipated.
The distance between the train and its destination was measured in miles and time.
The distance between the storm and its target was measured in the same units.
The storm’s distance was shrinking faster.
The arithmetic had been unfavorable since two o’clock, when the request was made. By the time the train crossed onto the Keys extension, the arithmetic had progressed from unfavorable to conclusive. The train could not reach Islamorada, load seven hundred men, and return to the mainland before the eye wall reached the Upper Keys. The sequence of delays — the two hours to assemble the train, the drawbridge, the locomotive repositioning at Homestead, the reduced speed across wind-loaded bridges — had consumed the margin that had existed, barely, when the request was made.
The margin was gone.
The train continued south.
There was nothing else it could do.