We pretty much had the fire under control, though it kept flaring up again so Robin and I kept spraying our fire extinguishers on it. That gunk doesn't taste any good at all. We'd been driving by the ready rail, where all the spare equipment is parked, when I noticed flames coming out of the wheel motors of 32 truck. "Whoa! Truck on fire!" So we sprang into action, like the highly trained fire-fighting coal miners we are.
I thought we were the only ones there but after a while I noticed the truck's operator on the other side of the truck. "Tim! Your truck's on fire! Your truck- it's on fire!" Tim was looking at me funny- like I was being dumb or something. But he wasn't hurrying over to help. He just stood there, so I kept telling him the obvious. I could tell he wasn't scared- people who get freaked out by these kinds of fires are easily recognized by the fact that they are running away. Tim was just giving me that weird look like he was embarrassed for me. Finally he pointed at the other wheel motor, the one he was standing by, and said, "Yeah- the fire's over here!"
It turned out both motors were on fire. So we put the other one out too. We hadn't seen the fire over there and Tim hadn't seen our side, so it created that bizarre discontinuity between us. Tim was wondering why were shouting about the fire but weren't doing anything about it and we were kind of wondering the same about him. Ah well. No harm done. Except for the wheel motors, I guess, which were steaming piles of molten goo. At first we thought it was the brakes that had caught fire- a relatively common occurance, but they both kept flaring up time after time so it was likely an electrical fire.
Anyways, if you look at this picture I added a little note to show where the wheel motors are.
Later on, I was on the water truck and it was all frozen up so we had to thaw it out with a tiger torch- basically a big flame thrower attached to a propane bottle. Which, if you think about it, is kind of ironic.