You mean other than some of our members.............:)

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago actually made a display of all the crap they cleaned out of U-505. Before moving Das Boot underground they cleaned and repainted her down to the bilges.
There they found 50 years of just about everything from popcorn tubs to trinkets to cameras. Just before the move I looked over a square glass box around a pillar near the tour entrance. It was filled to the top with the debris, a sign in front requested you hang onto your stuff when taking the tour.

Not railroad related, but similar:
Once when looking at a Frick portable steam engine that was sitting in the woods, I opened the smokebox to look at the front flue sheet. The handhole is at the bottom of the sheet, and was open, with handhole plate missing. Four baby mice quickly ran to the hole from inside the boiler, stood on their hind legs with front paws holding onto the plate edge @ the hole, and looked at me. They weren't scared at all, and posed a problem for me to see inside the boiler....they wanted food!

Speaking of bodies......

BTW, what about the old apocryphal tale always whipped out on the new roundhouse help in the old days, in which "Charlie" didn't come home from his shift, and his wife is at the shop to find him. Upon investigation, so the story goes, somebody finally remembers that the last time any one saw him was when went down the dome to help with a quick wash and internal on old "901". At which point the foreman states "We buttoned 'er up hours ago and sent 'er out on the Mechanicsville turn."

Immediately upon return to the terminal, the fire is dropped, blowdown opened, and the domelid removed to reveal to everyones horror a soggy pair of coveralls filled with bones and gristle laying atop the flues. No comment from the crew as to if the boiler foamed or not.

Don't know if it ever really happened, but it does give you the willies.

That's an easy one - bored mechanics sitting around during lunchbreak tossing "ringers" down the stack.

At Pennsylvania Trolley Museum we've found a number of items stashed away inside old trolleys. In one window pocket on a Pittsburgh Railways sweeper we found a whiskey bottle. Not hard to imagine how that got there during a long shift by the two man crew on a cold wet night.

A more significant find turned up between the walls of West Penn Railways center door car 739. It had been a home from retirement in 1952 until we acquired it in 1989. The find was a corked bottle containing a paper with details of the acquisition of the car by the family that made it into a home. A nice piece for our archives on the car.

an Owl/hawk carrying its prey.


In 765's initial restoration we found a hammer at the bottom of the boiler.
BTW some of the siderods are from scrapped berks. So a piece of non-existing NKP berks are still alive on 765.

A model railroad club I was in had to move from the back of a hobbyshop (St Joe Valley) and found a new home in the NYC Mishawaka Freight building, in the rafters in the cleanup work some blank freight bills were found, you know how for the dates on handwritten items like this look like "Date ___ __ 19__" and you fill in the blanks? These sheets had 18__.

The building was built in 1888.

Just a tidbit, near me where I live in teeny town Sodus, Michigan, there used to be an interurban line nearby, the Benton Harbor St Joe and Light company which eventually merged into the Northen Indiana system, there is a power pole at the corner of a street intersection where the line ran, and a spike is jammed into it.
Nope don't see how it assisted climbing.

While cleaning up an ex-ATSF lunch counter diner which had been sold to the Cadillac & Lake City, I turned up the only "Santa Fe" marked item in the car, a small drinking glass. First customer in the car spotted it on the shelf behind the counter, asked if it was for sale. Can't recall whether I said "Fifty cents" or "A dollar", but it wasn't much. He bought it and I rang up the sale. While putting in ties on the same railroad, turned up the remnant of a marker lamp on the edge of a long abandoned, parallel, narrow gauge logging line. Same shortline, while sweeping out boxcars for Christmas tree loading, found a one gallon miniature metal milk can in which some knight of the road had punched a few holes in the bottom to make a small fire pot. Being cheap by both nature and circumstance, I cleaned it up and gave it to my parents for Christmas as a container to hold kindling for the family fireplace. A noted Southern photographer who operated a studio and took quite a few photos of Southern railroads had an odd kink. He was able to talk some of his customers into posing for risque photos. He squirreled some of the prints away in odd places. I turned up set of photos in a storage space on a three axle Plymouth "Flexomotive" locomotive.

In the early 1980’s I worked for a firm that held a contract for scrapping railcars from the Chessie System. During one period we received several old work train car sets, these proved to be a “gold mine” of discoveries.

Once while cutting up an old troop sleeper that had been converted into Work Train Camp Car, I found 3 moldy, damp boxes of old track torpedoes shoved into a cubbyhole under one of the bunks. Our foreman got the bright idea of taking one of the boxes, sitting it on a concrete ballast block and with our crane dropping another concrete block onto the box of the torpedoes. The aftermath…. Well you could say we found a way to split the blocks into smaller pieces.

Another time I opened up an old baggage car to find it still full of track tools and supplies. For the grand sum of $ 50.00 paid to my employer and a case of beer for my foreman, I walked away with a bill of sale, 6 Track Jacks and my pick-up truck full of Ballast Forks, Track Wrenches, Pry Bars, Spike Mauls, Spike Pullers, and Rail Tongs.

While cutting up an old work train sleeper, our crew found several boxes full of “adult men’s 8mm films” of the Swedish type shoved above the ceiling. In the same car, the crew found a .22 single shot rifle wrapped in a oil skin along with several boxes of ammo that were shoved down between the panels of a partition.

My best find was discovering a box full of WM & Chessie System Rule Books and Timetables from a Western Maryland Railways former troop sleeper. Some were from the early 1970’s but most where duplicates from 1978, 1980, and 1981 right up to when the car was delivered to us for scrapping.

The one discovery that baffled me was the pile of rail expansion clips we found inside the water tank of a former steam locomotive tender. That tender was part of a work train set that came from the WM.

As for the track tools I scored. Over the years I have sold or gave away everything except 2 of the track jacks.

While rehabbing some of the Lackawanna coaches, a couple of workers found some Lackawanna combo ferry/railroad tickets and some original DL&W brochures between the seat brackets and coach walls.

When I was working on the B&M #3713, I found numerous nuts, bolts & washers buried in the impacted coal dust in the frame pockets. The neatest things were a 3 foot long pinch/alignment bar and a 2 1/4" open end wrench. Finding them was like digging in an archeological dig between the frames. I didn't know what they were until the packed coal dust was chipped away. Fun stuff!!

6167's frame is packed full of nuts and bolts as well.

Once a gondola car of scrap from the Ridgid Tool Co. was consigned to a customer on the short line that I worked for. I went home that night with a FULL set of Ridgid pipe wrenches, assembled from all those rejected, but still perfectly usable, parts in that car.

I still use a Black & Decker mag drill that I dug out of a scrap gon that came from a closed down CSX car shop.

When the V&T #27 tender was emptied of the last load of bunker C, filled up, no doubt on its last day of service, 1950, We found a walk over seat frame, one side, a tallow pot, a wheel set mover with a wooden handle, several hand tools, liquor bottles, rocks, and the remnants of a gage lamp.
When Al Bernard was cleaning out the V&T #22 Mckeen car in 1960, he dug out the original whistle, stashed in the nose tool box. He gave it to NSRM for the restoration. We found graffiti on the inside of the roof panels above the ceiling panels including the date, November, 1909 and a name.

CCDW -

Finding someones name and the date of November 1909 is kind of interesting. The difference between graffiti then (hide it so someone might find it some distant day in the future) and now (mark everything up garishly in public places that will get covered over officially or by some other graffiti "artist"). I think if I had my druthers, I'd take the old way of doing it.

Les

Under the siding of a Central RR and Banking Co car: "I'm siding this car beacuse my boss told me to. So much for lunch." Date was about 1898 if memory serves.

Colorado Midland combine conversion had a carman's name signed onto an upson board partition he installed sometime during the depression. I forget the name.

dave