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Great Daring Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan September 28, 2020 31 min

Josip Broz Tito - World War II — Yugoslav partisans wading across a river. Wikimedia

13. The Great Locomotive Chase

Andrews and his men seized a Confederate locomotive named The General. Library of Congress

Chugging along in their stolen train, James J. Andrews and his men stopped along the way to cut telegraph lines and remove some railroad tracks. Back in Big Shanty, the conductor whose locomotive they had hijacked, a William Fuller, organized a pursuit. With a hue and cry raised behind them, the Union raiders led the Confederate pursuers on a 90-mile chase on locomotives and on foot.

Andrews and his men burned a rail car atop a wooden bridge in an attempt to destroy it with fire and thwart pursuit. Wikimedia

The Confederates at Big Shanty first set off by foot, then by handcar, until Fuller and his posse reached an idle locomotive on a spur line. They fired it up, and began the chase in earnest. Switching locomotives along the way, Fuller and the pursuers steadily closed the distance with Andrews and his raiders. For some time, Andrews’ men managed to stay ahead of news of their raid because they had cut telegraph wires, thus preventing warnings and orders to block the raiders’ escape route from reaching Confederate forces ahead of the fleeing Union volunteers. For a while, things seemed to be going the daring raiders’ way. However, fortune is a fickle mistress, and she eventually turned her back on them.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.