Ron, I would also tend to agree that most locomotives like those 2 were lost overboard in storms at sea.Lake Erie alone has several locomotives from the 1850's -70's that were lost overboard in storms as i've found a few articles on microfilm at the library and after contacting a dive club they told me there were like 14 total that they knew of in the lake from documentation.As for searching for any they didn't seem very interested and said they were probably burried in lots of silt.In the early 1900's there was also a RR car ferry loaded with coal hoppers that sunk in a storm i think off Ashtabula.One account mentioned some fisherman snagging a anchor on a brake wheel from that wreck and pulling it up but as far as i know they've never found the actual location where it rests.

All the stories of locomotives,RR cars left and abandoned in the woods,burried in collapsed tunnels,sunk in the ocean or in lakes or left in a stone quarry be it true or not alway's get's my attention as i find it rather fascinating.Over 20 years ago i installed windows at the home of a elderly man up at Marblehead,Ohio and heard my first loco in a stone quarry story! He told me when he was a boy that they used to swim with some friends in one of the quarries there that was partially filled with water.He told me there was a old Shay in the water and that they would stand on top of the cab roof wich was a just a few feet under water when swimming.I don't know if there was actually any truth to it but he swore it was there.

Years ago i also remember reading in some RR magazine about a Rogers built loco down in New Zealand that was hauled out of the water where it had been dumped long ago with other locos for errosion purposes.They actually rebuilt the thing and ran it! The photo's of it when they hauled it out looked nothing more than a rusty boiler and wheels that one would swear would never run again.Didn't that RR up in Alaska dump some old locomotives along a river? Are they still there or has anyone salvaged any of them?

Think about it: it's shortly after the Late Unpleasantness, you are a railroad starting to dispose of old stuff now that you have recovered from the war, and you have 2 little teakettles to dispose of: do you break them up and scrap them out on dry land, dump them in a swamp nearby if scrapping isn't worth the trouble, or pay good money to a shipping company to haul them out to sea and drop them in?

I think we can settle on accidental immersion.

The AK and Kiwi engines were recycled as rip-rap instead of scrap purposely. More than one were recovered.

dave

Oh I don’t think the two engines off of New Jersey were intentionally dumped simply to dispose of them. I did not mean to suggest that. After all, they were brand new, from what I have heard. When I refer to the possibility of them being intentionally dumped, I mean dumping in order to lighten the load to help save the ship from a storm. That, along the possibility that they simply accidentally slid off of a ship’s deck in a storm are two popular theories to explain why two brand new, identical locomotives happen to be sitting side by side on the bottom of the ocean.

Earlier post on buried locomotives:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175

Somewhere recently, I saw a couple of photos of WP&Y locomotives, both recovered from riprap; as I recall, one was a 4-6-0, the other an outside-framed 2-8-0 similar to the currently operational No. 69. And now, darn it, I can't find the photos! Until then, here is some material that may be of interest to White Pass fans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wh ... s_and_cars

http://www.canadianrailwayobservations. ... -Part1.pdf

http://www.canadianrailwayobservations. ... -Part2.pdf

Looking at that picture, the Brits would tell us there is plenty more than enough for a complete rebuild. This one's hardly a challenge :)

Fritz,
I have heard about locomotives lost in the Great Lakes. If you ask around in any northern Minnesota town, people will tell you all sorts of stories about locomotives lost in swamps, lakes, rivers, quicksand, etc. But, of course, these locomotives are not visible, and in most cases, the descriptions are not consistent enough to seem convincing. However, I suspect there is some underlying truth to many of them.

While there is a tendency to pooh-pooh lost locomotive stories as all being fiction, I would submit that there are probably hundreds of lost locomotives in the U.S. alone. The reason it seems so far fetched is the often unreasonable expectation that lost locomotives have to be 4-8-4s free for the taking, and just waiting for someone to find them and clean them up. And it seems like it would be impossible for those heroic locomotives that would be such a dream to find, to be lost in the first place.

But the lost locomotives are the obscure players, and there is nothing far fetched about losing them; and nothing easy about finding them. Lakes, rivers, and soft ground could claim a small locomotive to the extent that its recovery was not worth the cost. It is easy to believe that history is entirely known, but there is in fact a lot of lost history when you get back into the 1800s when railroads were wild and primitive, and wrecks were far more common, and records have been lost or were never made.

I suspect that the inventory of lost locomotives would include a lot of logging and construction locomotives. Both operated on temporary track over unstable ground, often in proximity to water. I think the inventory would also include some main line locomotives that have become lost history or become such a tangled legend that the context no longer makes any sense.

The Churchill Tunnel locomotive is a well known lost locomotive legend. It is lost today due to a unique set of circumstances. Actually, it is not really lost, but it is just entombed. But I would consider that to be a variation of the lost locomotive status.

What is amazing about the two engines off the coast of New Jersey is just how vexing there presence is, and how unbelievably old they are. With all the marine growth, they probably aren’t impressing anybody with their appearance. I don’t know what should be done with them, but I hate to seem them left and forgotten. The experts seem to be convinced that an enormously expensive post recovery treatment would be needed to stabilize them. I really don’t know what to believe about that. I would think that under all that age-old marine growth, somewhere inside, there is shiny metal with press fits, and machine threads that has quite a story to tell.

I did some looking on steamlocomotive.com, and I found in the New Hampshire listing a Boston and Maine P2 pacific sunk in Portsmouth Harbor. Can I assume there's some form of substance to this, or is it another legend?
Edit* http://steamlocomotive.com/lists/search ... A&state=NH

Daylight 4449-the story of the B&M 4-6-2 is not legend, it's fact. Now, any stories beyond its existance, I can't vouch for. One story I have heard is that the trailing truck for the locomotive "disappeared", perhaps in conjunction with the Army Corps of Engineers attempting to move the locomotive to improve channel clearances?

I won't start any thread on "someone should recover it". Brackish water (i.e. salty) would not be kind to the locomotive after many decades.

And regarding this, plus the 1-2 British Columbian 2-8-0s that went into the drink-what would happen to the boiler and/or firebox when an under-steam locomotive goes into the drink?

Maybe it would be better so save some of the parts, like the builder's plate, and take some pictures of what's left...

To understand what it takes to correctly preserve something like this that is recovered from salt or brackish water; take some time to study what has been done with the turret, main engine, and other parts recovered from the wreck of the U.S.S. Monitor, a slightly older Civil War ironclad that went down in a storm off the coast of New Jersey, and whose components were in roughly the same condition as these two locomotives.

All of the raised iron parts had to be soaked in a solution to leech the salt out of the iron. Failure to do so would result in the parts literally falling apart upon exposure to air; the main engine and turret had to soak in that solution for years before it was safe to drain the tank and begin the careful process of removing the marine growth.

I was consulted by the museum on what the Monitor's Worthington steam pumps looked like both internally and externally after they removed they from the solution, but before they removed the marine growth and dismantled them for restoration. All of the bronze parts are virtually unharmed; but the cast iron parts have undergone a change in their physical makeup, and are now very brittle. Removing those locomotives from the ocean without taking the proper steps to preserve them will result in their sure destruction.

But, The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, VA is taking the right steps, and what they are finding is amazing. Those pumps are the oldest complete steam pumps known to exist (I have a nameplate from one that may be even older); the turret is the first example of it's type, and the Penn trunk main engine is the only survivor it's type, I believe.

Pine Creek Rwy. and New Jersey Historical Diving Ass'n. both understand how the locomotives will have to be treated after recovery. The most they expect is to raise one and use it, after treatment, as a pattern for building a reproduction. The expert opinion seems to be that they are from the early 1850s.
I have posted a few times about an older locomotive waiting to be found, but in cold fresh water, a much better preservative. It's the Lackawanna RR's 2nd steam engine, the Morris & Essex RR's "Essex". It was sold to the Western Ohio RR in 1850 and sank in Lake Erie on the steamer "Clarion".

I have heard explanations of iron decomposing upon removal from long submersion in salt water. I don’t necessarily dispute that, but I have read comments indicating that the cost of this stabilization for the NJ locomotives would be so high that such stabilization would be completely out of the question. I do have some idea of the cost to recover the locomotives, and certainly that would be significant.

However, from what I have read, the showstopper would be the cost of stabilization. This suggests that the cost of stabilization would be much higher than the cost of recovery. I am not convinced that the stabilization program that would cost that much is necessary. I assume that there is not a broad base of this type of work to use as a reference point for cost, and that cost could rise to meet whatever amount someone is willing to spend.

Generally, I get the impression that the justification for recovery of the two locomotives has to be based on a plan for restoration. But that seems like such a torturous road that it would not surprise me if the no plan went forward. Recovering one of the locomotives to use as a pattern for building a new one seems especially tenacious in clinging to the idea that some sort of restoration must be the outcome. At best, you would end up with a reproduction of an historical locomotive. But the purity of the restoration would be impossible to confirm, no doubt, due to the missing parts of the artifacts. If one were to spend all that money on a reproduction, there would be many other worthy candidates that would rival the NJ locomotives in both historical significance and design information available.

My idea of the perfect outcome would be to have the locomotives standing in a display looking just like they looked on the ocean bottom, except having the marine growth removed, so the metal surfaces could be seen. To me, that is the most important story these locomotives tell. It is the intricate yet primitive mechanical nature of the artifact, combined with the durability of their construction, and the ravages of time and submersion.

I'm still for a mythbusters style approach (raising the mythtanic anyone?)... And, if my understanding of desalination is correct, maybe finding a freshwater river (preferably near a bay, so all the salt would be washed out and leave less deposits that could effect the aquatic ecosystem) to immerse the locomotive(s) in might not be out of the question. But, something like these engines being raised is most likely more complex than what I understand

Its easy, get some airbags, lift em, measure em, sweep em up.


They are not doing any good where they are.

Mike P

Ummm.... I suppose your approach to steam locomotive restoration is "lube up the rods, fill up the boiler, and throw a fire in her"?

Or to car restoration "rip off the old wood, nail on new wood with a nail gun, paint everything up with sealing paint, and replace the windows"?

I well remember the folks who were adamant that all they had to do to raise the HMS Titanic was pump it full of ping-pong balls.......