These cars were discussed here several years ago, maybe around 2002 or 3. The dining car was a Wagner, not many of these old wooden passenger cars have been saved to my knowledge. Trucks for the car were on site though not under the body.

The interurban was a 2-digit LSE car, long and simple design carbody. Maybe it was number 14? The car seemed to have been in an accident and was retired with damage to one end of the car. It may have been on trucks - I dunno. A controller was in the car, as were a few seats and a heater. Preservation worthy but if it is still there the weather has taken its toll. Would love to hear more.

My only find was a pair of WW1 era steel boxcars from the EJ&E with the "Around not thru Chicago" map logo. Sitting idle on a disconnected North Shore spur in Skokie. Unfortunately when I returned to do something serious about preservation, they had been recently torched to the frame. :(

My "discovery" isn't there anymore, but it's recorded on film. It wasn't out in some remote rural area, but in the older part of Pasadena, CA. Back in 1968 I was taking movies of a UP NW-2 switching Orban Lumber west of "Old Town" Pasadena. The crew was finishing up that part of the job, and the conductor asked "Wanna go to Altadena with us?" There are milliseconds, and microseconds, and then there's the amount of time before I said "Yes!" I rode the back platform of the caboose as it was pushed uphill. When we got to the Lincoln Ave. grade crossing, I noticed that the crossing diamonds for the Pacific Electric streetcar line were still in place! They had last carried Birney cars in 1941, but there they were in the Space Age. The UP track (and the UP Craftsman-style depot on Colorado Blvd) are long gone, taken out by the I-210 freeway around 1970. One relic of this line is back in service: the plate-girder bridge that carried the UP across the Pasadena Freeway on the north side of South Pasadena has been used by the southbound Gold Line light rail operation for over five years now.

Folks,

As we know my weekday job is at the SF Maritime Park.

So it seems that the Clyde Maritime Trust at Glasgow Scotland purchased the retired sail training bark Galatea from the Spanish Navy. Her rig was gone and the hull was in terrible shape. However she was originally the merchant bark Glenlee built in Glasgow in 1896. not having a shailing vessel there is like not having a Model T Ford on display in Detroit, Michigan.

Our park preserves her near cousin the ship Balclutha build in Glasgow in 1886. The folks from the Trust knew they needed help on the project. So I started researching the vessel and found what turned out to be the oldest picture of her on a glass plate in a small maritime museum collection who did not have the facilities to print it.

So my wife and I drove the 75 miles over there to hand deliver the glass plate to our professional dark room staff.

They printed and enlarged it so many time that the bark's restoration crew there in Glasgow could see where and what kind of rigging went where, what shape of the various deck fittings were and where they went etc.

Today Glenlee is tied up next to the new Museum Of Transport in Glasgow. She is one of only 5 Clyde built square riggers afloat in the world! And the Clyde River has had over 10,000 sailing ships launched into it over the last several hundred years.

Another marine related one:

Awhile back, I purchased a Worthington Steam Pump nameplate on e-bay. The seller thought it was "from the 1950s"; but knew nothing else about it.

Turns out it had a four digit serial number and no works name; so it was more likely from the mid-1850s. (Worthington founded the company to produce his invention, the direct-acting steam pump, in 1848.) I then searched the web for pictures of Worthington steam pumps from that period, to try and get an idea of what the steam pump may have looked like.

Fast forward a year or two later; I met someone with the The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, VA. They had recovered a pair of Worthington steam pumps, along with the famous turret and trunk type main steam engine from the Civil War Ironclad U.S.S. Monitor. The pumps were in a perserving tank, still covered with marine growth; and he was looking for information on the pumps before they attempted to remove the marine growth and take them apart.

We compared pictures and notes in the next year or two. It will be neat when they go on display; they are probably the oldest direct-acting steam pumps in existance. (My nameplate may be older still.) Myself and the members of my Steam Lizards group are the few individuals outside of the museum who saw the steam pumps (via e-mail) before they go on display.

Last year our organization was given an old Morgan overhead crane. It had an early serial number (613) and had that nice classic crane look with fishbelley girders and rivets. When I started to do some research into the history of the crane I learned that it was built in 1892 for Otis Steel Co. in Cleveland. That date meant it was built for the Lakeside Works, a rather important plant as that was the site where Samuel T. Wellman first made basic open hearth steel on a commercial basis. It was not at the Lakeside plant when I found it but in another building 60 miles away. The Lakeside plant was demolished and the property doesn't even exist as I-90 cuts right through the site about 20' below the old plant's grade.

That discovery in itself is a great find, but researching further I find that electric overhead crane technology was only four years old when this crane was built, and that only 118 serial numbers seperate this crane from Morgan's first electric crane. The one truly amazing thing is that we have not yet found another operable electric overhead crane that is older than this one! This crane has been in service for 115 years in total obscurity, and now is being moved to a new display building where it will be returned to operation and hopefully serve another 115 years.

One I had forgotten about - driving across the 8th Street bridge in Altoona, PA, spring of 1997, and looking down in the Conrail yard where I spotted what appeared to be a couple of passenger cars. I did a U-turn, and with permission from the trainmaster, went exploring. Both were refugees from a wreck train heading for scrap; one was a lightweight baggage car of unknown origin and the other was a heavyweight that appeared to have been a dining car. I ended up buying the heavyweight, mostly for the trucks, but toyed with restoring it someday. Eventually it became one thing too many at the shop, but lo and behold, along came the Erie-Lackawanna Dining Car Preservation Society who identified it as a genuine Erie dining car. They bought it and have been pursuing restoration steadily since.

Alan Maples
Everett Railroad

I think anyone who has been involved with railway preservation for any length of time has their share of these stories:

Story 1
Up in Michigan in 1971 or '72 with Norm Krental psyching out how to move the Michigan Electric car body he and Bob Kutella had found at a lakeside community, we were poking around the rest of the small country lot. Norm spotted a rusty piece of pipe lying behind a stone wall on the perimeter of the property and started to fish it out of the weeds. "Hey, Norm. That's probably the trolley pole" I quipped. It was. The car had been placed there more than forty years before when the line abandoned shortly after the stock market crash in 1929, and the pole must have been taken off the roof and set aside soon afterwards. Too deteriorated to use, it was significant in that it proves these big cars had trolley wheels, not sliders.

Story 2
At one time I was foolish enough to think that an interurban parlor car could be re-framed under the great open sky (ah, the innocence of youth) and I did no small amount of work on the TMER&LCo. parlor car in IRM's collection. At the time, IRM traced the car's lineage to the L&PS, previously TMER&TCo. coach 1135, previously TMER&LCo. MENDOTA, extensively rebuilt from an early Khulman coach at Cold Springs in 1924.

One summer day, as I was needle scaling my way down the car side, outlining little six inch squares and then beating them clean, when I noticed near the center of the car that the gray undercoating had some odd red splotches, and those splotches looked suspiciously like a railroad roman M. A half hour later, the next swath down the side revealed an E, then an N. While the gold leaf was long gone, it appeared that the varnish size had soaked into the various primer coats, making the red oxide prime coat more plastic and less friable, so it wasn't shearing off the knifing compound used to initially smooth the plate quite the same as the surrounding area. I realized that before I quit for the day, I was going to uncover the original location of the car name.

Imagine my surprise when the next letter to be revealed appeared to be an O, not a D, but I couldn't tell for sure. Now I was interested, and I just started chipping my way horizontally along the line of the lettering. M…I…N…E…E. It seems that sometime in the mists of the past, either when the cars were renumbered to coaches in Milwaukee, or when they were re-numbered by new owner L&PS, the roster information had been recorded incorrectly, and the car at IRM was the sister car MENOMINEE, not the MENDOTA a fact that had gone unnoticed for at least twenty five years.

Story 3
I don't do much railway preservation these days, nor much railfanning; it seems there is nothing left to discover. But about ten years ago, when my Dad decided he wanted to visit the air field he was stationed at during WWII, we took a trip to Nome, AK. Now, everybody knows about the ex New York elevated Fornies stranded on the tundra; Nome tourist information even mentions them, billing the attraction as "The Railway to Nowhere." Since we rented a "car" while we were there (the common car rental in Nome is a 4WD pickup), we had to drive out to see them. It's a nice drive along the Seward Pemninsula coast; the Bearing Sea is pretty in July when it's sunny.

We also had to drive north out of town, along the route of the narrow gauge Seward Peninsula Railroad, which Dad remembered. The line had closed with the collapse of the mining industry during the depression, but the Army was patrolling it with flanged wheel equipped Jeeps. Dad got sent out on one with a nose wheel to rescue a plane that had developed engine trouble and stubbed its toe landing on the beach of Solomon Lake. It took the better part of the day to wend their way about thirty miles north of Nome, and they spent a couple nights at a hunter's cabin while repairs were made.

All evidence of the railroad is now gone, but after asking some natives and showing them a picture of the cabin, they gave us directions, and sure enough, we found it. We then continued north to see how far the road went before it ended.

About ten miles further on, a clump of bushes on the tundra caught my eye. The permafrost that underlies the tundra limits plant growth to about 12" high; taller vegetation is a sure sign that the surface has been disturbed and the permafrost is melting. Braving the voracious mosquitoes, we hiked down from the road to see what was in the bushes.

Flatcars. Three narrow gauge flatcars lying side by side, upside down with their wheels in the air. I'm sure the decks and sills are as close to compost as wood can come and still retain it's form, but the trucks were remarkably well preserved. The wheels were marked Wells & French, and a date in the late 1800's, so they must have been second hand at the time of the Nome gold rush in 1900. I have no idea from where they might have come.

Mr. Anderson -

I feel real bad about the loss of those two "Around not thru Chicago" EJ&E box cars.
Sure would have liked to have one at HVRM. l know that Bob Kutella of IRM would have liked one too.

Here's another story. Going through Pine Village, Indiana one day, my wife suddenly shouted, "hey, there's a caboose!". Needless to say, I turned the car around and headed back where I found a L&N bay window caboose on a very narrow lot right off of the main street. One side was lettered for the Chicago, Attica & Southern and the other side for the Monon. Turns out, the owner (I'm sorry, I have lost his name) worked for the Monon and later the L&N and finally CSX. He tried to buy a caboose for years from CSX but with no luck. He finally gave up and gave the property outside of town that he was going to put the caboose on to his two adult kids. Of course THEN the railroad told him that they had a caboose for him. The town had the small lot right off of the street and told him he could use it. He painted the caboose for his first rail employer and for the CA&S which at one time went through Pine Village just to the east of town. Over time, he had filled the inside with various railroad items making it kind of a mini-museum. When he showed it to my wife and I, I noticed a Baldwin builders plate on display . He found it laying in the ground where an old scrap yard had been. I checked the number and found out it was for an old Wabash 0-6-0 which had been sold to the scrap yard for switching service. I then purchased a nice 8 x 10 photo of the engine from M. D. McCarter, framed it and sent it to the owner of the caboose. My pleasant rail discoveries in Pine Village didn't end there. A couple of years later, my friend Tom Travis and I stopped by there so I could show him the caboose and he also wanted to see where the CA&S went through town, so we headed for the old right-of-way. Pulled into the bulk oil dealer there and found an old building. We looked it over and realized it was the old CA&S depot, now completely covered with metal siding hiding its original use! The operators bay window and the overhanging ends with their ornate bracing, revealed the buildings origin as the local depot. I believe it is one of only two CA&S structures still in existance!

Les

Well I have discovered some stuff like that trolley also useing the internet I have come upon some stuff I would like to investigate like this one in Wareham MA, http://www.uer.ca/locations/viewgal.asp ... alid=19010 Any one have any information on this? Also found out about this in Upton MA but the info I got was from 06 http://www.uer.ca/locations/show.asp?locid=25113

Well, this isn't really a find on my part, and I'm not at liberty at this time to disclose all the details, but here's something I find really interesting.

We have a 1920's ALCO locomotive that we are evaluating for possible restoration. A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from a guy who has no apparent interest in railroad history, but enough interest in history in general to know when he has a significant find. He'd been poking around in an old building that used to be used for a railroad shop. He found a bunch of blueprints, that were identified as to the railroad and the road number of the engine. He did a bit of searching on the 'net, and found that we were the present owners of that engine.

So he sent me an e-mail asking if I might be interested in having them! Of course I said, "Yes!" A couple of weeks ago I received the first of what will probably be two large packages.

First thing out of the box was a booklet titled, "AMERICAN LOCOMOTIVE COMPANY, Locomotive Card Record." It then listed the order number, shop number and road number. Inside is an 18 page list of all the drawing numbers for that locomotive. (About 40 or 50 drawings listed on each page). I'm about half-way through doing an inventory of what I have, about 400 prints, and it is amazing. The prints were in totally random order, so it has taken some time to sort them out.

But what I am finding are drawings of everything from the frame and boiler, down to the nuts and bolts that hold things together. All the drawings are date-stamped "ALCO BP Room."

So, when we restore this fine machine, we will know exactly what it was like when new. And, anything that is different, we will know that it was a repair or modification.

I'm still amazed.

Well Jim, YOU didn't find this stuff, but your benefactor certainly did! So it certainly should be included here as a "real" discovery.

Les

I think that the most significant discovery that TVRM made was one that happened just before I joined. They got a report of a farmer down in Central Georgia who had a locomotive and wanted to donate it to the museum. No one was aware of any locomotive in the area that the farm was in, so there wasn't too much interest. However, some museum representatives did go down to look the locomotive over.

The locomotive turned out to be ex-Central of Georgia Railway No. 349-a 1891 Baldwin 4-4-0. The locomotive had been purchased from the railroad years ago as something for the farmer's children to play on. Now it was time to find it a new home and we gladly accepted. Despite being on the farm for decades, the locomotive was in very good condition. It had been stored under a large pole shed and still had all of the gauges and other items on it.

As for personal finds, I purchased a lot of antiques from a collector in St. Louis whose uncle had collected all sorts of artifacts from the Western and Atlantic Railroad of the State of Georgia. Most of the items are easily identified-parts off an 1880s Western and Atlantic Railroad coach and 1840s vintage iron bridge rail. One scrap puzzled me for a while until I realized that it was a piece of strap iron rail-after reading some detailed reports of the construction of the railroad, I realized that they did have a portion of line laid with strap rail. I would never had come across these items if it weren't for the fact that I purchased a book from this gentleman on eBay.

So is Central of Georgia 349 a candidate for operation?

Don't know if this means anything, but it's listed here as "Operational":
http://cofg.org/index.php?option=com_su ... number=349

That is interesting. Many years ago, I wrote an article about CofG steam survivors of which 4-4-0 #349 of course, was a part. At that time, Mr. Fickling the owner, explained to me that the little American had been considered for operation at Stone Mountain, but was rejected due to a "bad boiler". Hopefully, this report that the old Baldwin is in fact operational is true, because she sure is a pretty thing!

Les