> The 765 is located in Gary, and the 624 is
> located in Hammond.

You are indeed correct. I guess I should have taken a little closer look at the photo. After I posted my note, I took another look, and did see that it wasn't the 624. I guess that the basis of the problem is the same, both neglected park locomotives that are very close to each other and with a large population base very near.

schemel@execpc.com

Brian,

Thanks for the kind words. I am hoping that as my site grows it will become a focal point for information on lost engines and other railroad artifacts. The process of aquiring information has been slow going so far. But with the help of people like Brian information is always available.

Perhaps a book might be a good idea as well ;)

-=Andrew=-

RumorWeb
abrandon@foothill.net

In a bid to set the record for longest gap between posts in this forum:

We actually MAY have a contender for "photographic evidence" of actual "buried steam locomotives."

This photo cropped up on Facebook tonight as a


http://images.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/ ... resnum=244


My response:
I'm not so sure that's actually a wreck.
First, note that this is three months after the devastating March 1936 floods in Pennsylvania, which said photographer also covered in earlier images. Second, why is there a lousy embankment right alongside the river? This shows three or four rather large steam locomotives on their sides right alongside the river, and that flat/gondola closest to the camera. There's utterly no need for those locomotives to have been operating together on steel plant property. The tenders look empty.
My educated guess is that four worn-out steam locomotives have been toppled there deliberately as rip-rap to help rebuild a river shore that was eroded by the 1936 flood, before more fill was dumped to rebuild the property.

Anyone care enough to have thoughts, grab a magnetometer, etc.?
And before you ask: It's too early to be a PRR J1 that certain folks allege was buried at the Curve.....

Another possibility is that they were just parked on a track that ended up undercut by the river.

What about the one which was supposedly or questionably to be Buried in a NYC subway tunnel?

Mr. Starr

Thanks to the University of Pittsburgh the posted image is pannable and zoomable.
We can spend as much time as we like going over the fine details, like the steam coming from the far loco. The full coal bunker, attached bells, what the workers behind might be up to. I enlarged and enhanced the sample below with photo shop, I love the resolution of the old glass plates.

I have to agree with Mr. Mitchell on this one. To me it looks like the four engines were dumped intentionally to reinforce the bank and with additional fill (probably stone) to be put over them. The "steam" from the far locomotive might be explained a couple of ways:

1. It's not steam from that engine, but from another source.

2. That engine was steamed up just enough to pull the other three (and the gon) onto the very temporary track which was set up so that the engines would fall the correct way. This explanation probably would also explain why the tenders didn't quite tip over far enough.

These locomotives don't look particularly "worn out" to me, however, if Bethlehem Steel needed some locomotives to dump and approached the Pennsy, they would have certainly helped out such a good customer. Also, this was 1936, in the depths of the depression, and the PRR probably had engines stored out of service doing nothing.

Finally, although this might be Bethlehem Steel, the building in the background looks very much like the back end of a roundhouse. Perhaps a Bethlehem Steel in-plant house, but looks pretty big for that. Also, coal dock visible in the distance. Might this actually be the Pennsylvania facilities in Johnstown? I don't have any idea as to how extensive their rail properties were there, but if this IS the Pennsy itself, then the dumping of the out-of-service steamers makes even more sense.

This is all simply my guesswork, but glad the photo was posted. We need another puzzle to work on!

Les

I do not believe that the locomotives are situated as the result of a wreck or derailment.

I would bet that this photo shows the locomotives being placed as riprap. A secondarily, it might show an incident where parked locomotives were undermined by the river and toppled over. But if that were the case, why would the locomotives have been parked there? Were locomotives scrapped at this steel mill (if it is a steel mill)?

However, the photo does indicate a high probability of the locomotives being buried there today if they were placed as riprap, or even if they inadvertently toppled into the river. What does the site look like today?

I just spent over an hour cross-referencing a variety of sources at my personal disposal, including, but not limited to, vintage maps, the 1939 aerial views at http://www.pennpilot.psu.edu/, various reference books on my shelves, and some online searches as well.

The roundhouse in question is the PRR roundhouse on the northern bank of the Little Conemaugh River at Conemaugh Yard, to the northeast of both central Johnstown and the Bethlehem Steel plant. This roundhouse had been rebuilt and modified several times, both after the 1889 flood (in which 32 locomotives were swept downstream from in and around this location) and as new turntables were installed. At the time of this photo it would have had a 100-foot turntable. There was substantial damage done around the roundhouse by the March 1936 flood

This photo is reproduced in PRR Triumph I by Charles Roberts and Gary Schlerf, from the RR Museum of Pa. collection. The steel structure at the right is identified as the framework for the travelling ashpit crane. The author speculates, as we do, that the locos were placed there as rip-rap to stabilize the bank at that location.

A Bing Bird's Eye flyover of this site reveals a large modern concrete wall where this location was, most likely dating to replacement after the July 1977 flooding which devastated the Little Conemaugh valley and did substantial damage to the rights-of-way.

I'll wager the locos are long gone.

Now, if someone can just find this spot on Google Earth....

Yes it is a fascinating photo, and thanks to Buzz Morris for working on that enlarged detail.

They may have dumped the locomotives for erosion control and then later scrapped them for their scrap value; or they may have removed them to make way for a better erosion control measure such as the big concrete wall that is there today. Or maybe the engines were removed for an erosion control measure that pre-dated the big wall. Or possibly, the engines are there today behind the wall. But that seems like a longshot.

I would expect that if the engines were even within the construction zone for the wall, they would have removed them in the process of working on the site. With that type of construction project, they would want highly engineered earthwork around it. In that context, buried locomotives would be just so much trash that would need to be removed to do the proper excavating, concrete work, backfilling, and compacting.

Since it was a PRR engine house, the presence of locomotives on the property would be normal. So I think it is possible that the engines were parked there and toppled into the river as it eroded the bank. If that is the case, the photos may depict the beginning of work to immediately recover them for either future service or possible scrapping.

If those four engines have been toppled down the bank as erosion control, that strikes me as a rather sloppy approach to the problem. It is not as if it would not require considerable effort, and probably more material would have been needed to fill in around the engines. I know that there is a history of junk being thrown into rivers to control bank erosion, but that is usually a half measure or compromise.

But what I wonder about is the fate of those other 32 locomotives that washed away in the 1889 flood. Are there any legends regarding the possibility that some of them were never recovered?

Here it is in 1939 (from http://www.pennpilot.psu.edu) with what looks like several locomotives and tenders stretching along the riverbank from the roundhouse to the upper right:


They appear to be still there in 1958. The 1967 image is hard to make out as tree canopies have popped up.

And the same place now(-ish) (from Google maps):

Not buried as such, but a 4-4-0 was pulled from the Suwanee River near Luraville, Florida in the late 70s by a private individual. It sat in front of his trailer (it's Florida, remember? Lots of people there still live in trailers) for a while before it was donated to the state of Florida and it sits at a state facility on the East side of Tallahassee. Not much left after being underwater all those years, though:
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=227859&nseq=3

The locomotives in the picture were all fairly new at the time. The group appears to include I.1.s, H.10.s and L.1.s freight engines. These are all accounted for in rosters, with none scrapped as early as 1936. They were recovered after the flooding subsided, shopped, and returned to service. If there was sufficient warning, they would have selected equipment in need of shopping to use as rip rap, but if time was short anything handy would have been dumped.

In an issue of Model Railroader, former editor John Page recounted seeing an I.1.s 2-10-0 lowered into a river with cranes in 1926 for the same purpose. Though it had a boiler full of water, it was buoyant enough to be washed away from where they wanted it. None of the Decapods were off the roster till after WWII, so this one too was recovered, put right, and run for many more years.

Each of the locomotives appears to be far too new to be written off as scrap. The research seems to bear out a the washout theory. If the PRR wanted to stop the erosion, why derail the locomotives intentionally? The displacement of earth probably was responsible. The concrete wall was probably a deep excavation, a wide footing, filled with stone an concrete. No modern locomotives.