If you're going to claim that the Pennsylvania RR had a locomotive numbered 4472, a roster published elsewhere and/or photograph will probably suffice.
If you're going to make an extraordinary claim that would require the discarding of almost all currently known aspects of science, biology, physics, or the like--aliens visiting by UFOs and abducting people, the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, extra-sensory perception, healing by prayer, etc.--you will need to present a LOT more evidence, to multiple teams of analysts trained not just in science, but in sleight-of-hand, fraud, and deception, and/or other relevant aspects of the genre--Scottish geology and zoology, in the case of the Loch Ness Monster.

In the realm of railway preservation I can't think of a case where scientific inquiry will be needed. In the case of the extraordinary claim of a PRR switcher in a quarry a contemporary photo (without obvious photoshop) of the switcher in the quarry should be enough for anyone.

So far such evidence hasn't existed.

No, in the case of the Loch Ness Monster, all you would need is the monster -- dead or alive -- to validate the claim. That would just be ordinary evidence validating an extraordinary claim. In the case of rumored railway equipment, the required evidence would simply be the unearthing, or otherwise discovering, of the equipment for which the extraordinary claim was made that it still existed. Digging things up, or just finding things that have been lost, would be an ordinary way of providing evidence. But I only tossed out the remark "in fun," and perhaps I've been exposed lately to too much philosophical debate.

As someone who has a shelf full of books on the Loch Ness Monster, I can tell you this much:

Uncovering a monster, dead or alive, is only part of the picture.

Then you're stuck with explaining, among other things:
*How an aquatic reptile (if we adopt the idea that it descended from a plesiosaur) evolved into an amphibian or fish unlike any seen before, with the capability of breathing underwater for such long periods without surfacing;
*How any such creature, be it amphibian or reptilian (both cold-blooded), evolved to withstand 42-degree-F water year-round;
*How said creature evolved a breeding population that maintained enough biodiversity to withstand inbreeding collapse in such a small body of water without surfacing much, OR found a way to live for millions of years without dying;
*How this breeding population developed the ability to be impervious to side-scan radar that has been used to sweep the entire loch on numerous occasions;
*How such a breeding population found sustenance in a loch that has been found through numerous biological surveys to have barely enough fish to keep a couple otters alive....

By the time your scientific inquiry is completed, you have basically thrown out every aquatic/marine biology textbook and reference book into the rubbish heap as outdated and obsolete, as well as most biology and basic science textbooks. With one carcass, you would have fundamentally destroyed virtually all biological theory and understanding.

That, my friend, is what we mean by "extraordinary evidence."

With a piece of railroad equipment "hidden away" in a quarry or barn or whatnot, you not only need to find the loco/whatever, but you have to conjure a means by which it was secured and hidden from prying eyes and rumormongers for decades. You're assuming that it got away from any number of slobbering PRR/AT&SF/LS&I/Shay/ACL/caboose/whatever fanatics and historians; you're assuming that ALL the locals know nothing about "that crazy guy that has a steam loco in his barn/a railroad car in the woods as a hunting cabin/etc." and so forth.
Having personally "beaten the bushes" for several "vanished" steam locomotives and cars, I can tell you that NONE of this happens in this alleged vacuum, especially not in the Internet era. You personally may not have heard about it; it may not be well publicized; and it may even be known strictly on a "need-to-know" basis among a select few, such as a certain "hoard" in the Midwest. But those that should know typically do, as well as a few others--the local county historians, the country newspaper or magazine editors, the folks that went back to that quarry to swim, etc.

I find it a little disturbing that Sandy has a half a bookshelf of literature devoted to the Loch Ness Monster.....and must disagree that once the existence of anything is demonstrated, it is necessary to continue to prove the existence by filling every missing hole in the history. Nice to know, but if it's there, it's there and if it's not, it's not.

What evidence is "extraordinary?" Evidence is provable or can be disproven. Theory or rumor or hypothesis.....needs evidence of the ordinary kind only. Just because the general consensus doesn't agree doesn't make any ordinary evidence unreliable until proven otherwise. To this extent, no evidence is "extraordinary."

dave

To be fair, an awful lot of it was acquired recently for cheap or free, and many overlap with other "sea monster" legends, imagined and real. My interest stems from an overlap of interest in Scottish things with an interest in "crypto-science," or the study of alleged/mysterious/barely-tangible things--UFOs, Sasquatch, "Bermuda Triangle," etc.--which then overlaps with working with professional magicians, many of whom also specialize in debunking fraudsters or exposing hoaxes, or otherwise being "skeptical" about allegations of the mysterious and unknown. People can get rich selling books about UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, or the Loch Ness Monster or selling admissions to the "Area 51 Information Center" or "Loch Ness Visitors Center and Museum"; they don't get very many sales writing a book debunking said phenomena. The whole thing develops into its whole field of psychology itself, the study of why many people are willing to believe such legends, chronicled in Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things and the like.

The nice part about Loch Ness as a "phenomenon" is that, unlike UFOs which could be anywhere, or "Bigfoot" which could be anywhere in the Rockies or Himalayas, you're dealing with a quantified 27 miles by 1-2 miles by 750-900 feet deep. You literally have "a barrel to shoot in," as far as investigation. And that small area has proven to be the undoing of the legend of late--whereas now "everyone" now has a camera or video camera on their person via a cell phone, the amount of photography or video captured has dwindled to nothing. Whereas before people had to sit and watch the loch constantly with a camera at the ready, technology has made automatic full-time monitoring possible. And nothing worth noting has appeared, and even past "evidence" has now been debunked.

To bring this back to railroading, enough analysis of not only how and why such legends arise but why people are willing to believe them can lead one to further understand not only how and why such legends as the "NYC Hudson in a barn/loco lost in the woods/loco sunk in a flooded quarry/GM singlehandedly destroyed the trolley in the USA/etc." come about, but how/why some people are so willing to believe them in spite of contrary evidence or lack of supporting evidence. (Unfortunately, the word "gullible" is too often a part of the discussion.)

But now you have just changed what your trying to prove from the binary question of if such a beast currently exits to the entire history of the animal. That's just out right cheating is it not?

That's like saying if we did find the PRR switcher in the quarry, complete with PRR lettering remaining, it still isn't proven to exist until we have found out what shop it was built in and the exact date it got into the quarry.

Around here we don't have quarries, but the logging legacy of the entire Allegheny Plateau is pretty well documented, and we've got our own legends.

So far my best was brought to me by an ex-employee, not prone to exagerration, who had told me of a locomotive he found in the woods while exploring on horseback. At least he thought it was a locomotive.

So, a year later, he brought back pictures. Down over a bank, rolled over, what appears to be a small stripped logging locomotive boiler. Likely Shay. No sign of running gear. VERY inacessible area. 'looks like' it rolled over the bank and everything but the boiler was salvaged.

Backchecking left some tantalyzing clues that one of the early shays of the likely culprit logging line was documented as purchased but had no disposition records recorded by Casler.

So while I'm pretty sure there's a boiler, and its a Shay, it's not like we've got a whole Shay sealed up in amber out here, and it's out of normal walking range from where he identified the location. Most times people only go in there to rescue other lost individuals. This one has shown up nowhere, not on geocaching, hiking, railroad, or other fan sites.

All that being said, I still like to believe in the legends. I've had too much fun finding unrecorded stuff in the field not to, and even more fun getting them to museums.

I will tell you from personal proof there's two ex-CSXT coal hoppers lying on their side beside the ex-Buffalo Creek & Gauley main, from the 80's that derailed and were just left there. And they will be there for a while.

Absolutely not.

If you uncover a "giant monster" in Loch Ness, you are then looking at just what it is. Reptile, amphibian, mammal, giant amoeba, Hollywood prop, robotic animatron? If it's anything like what most portrayals of the "monster" are, whatever it is, the discovery itself raises massive questions, either biological/zoological or logistical (i.e. who stuck a giant robot into the lake unseen, and how and why?).
Or, conversely, you say "It's an otter/sturgeon/comorant/grebe/boat wake/log."
The "legend" exists. The sightings, for the most part, can easily be attributed to misidentified common natural phenomena and the susceptibility of man to believe in strange things. The "extraordinary claim" is that it's somehow an entire species of plesiosaur/whatever that survived hundreds of millions of years in a captive, tiny location, and ONLY said location (or a few other lakes, such as Loch Morar). THAT claim requires the "extraordinary evidence."

If you find this hypothetical "locomotive" in this specific quarry, then your next step is to prove it is, indeed, first a locomotive and then a PRR switcher, and not a traction engine boiler, a propane tank dumped years ago, a pick-up truck, or whatever. Get to even THAT point, and you've got "extraordinary evidence." If you find something standard-gauged and 0-6-0 with tender or whatever, it's quite easy to extrapolate what it is from that point. Common sense and a knowledge of loco types owned by railroads in Pennsylvania and elsewhere will quickly reduce the possibilities to a couple PRR, Reading, or LV types or whatever, or conversely some locos built for industrial use--no real need to look at all the ACL, IC, SP, SP&S, WP, FEC, CN, etc. switchers. We wouldn't be rewriting the entire history of railroading in North America, or even the locos of the PRR/whatever. We'd just be tracking down what happened to one loco that went astray and how it stayed "hidden" from the railfans of the era, and from folks like Victor Koenigsberg, J. David Conrad, and Bob Yarger, as well as hundreds of obsessive-compulsive PRR historian fanatics.

Now, if someone finds a 4-8-4 in that water, on the other hand.....

I spent some time in the late 1990s chasing down the parlor car MT. VERNON that once ran on the Washington & Mt. Vernon trolley line. The legend was it was in use as a residence on the Patuxent River in southern Maryland. Alas, I was a few years too late - the car was scrapped and a traditional house now occupies the site.

Wesley

One thing that has been touched on, but deserves to be reminded of, is what it is like to be the unlucky 'owner' of such a legend, when who-knows-what is looking for it. Such searches are inherently risky, and if it is on private land, inherently unwelcome.

This year, I happened to be the unlucky recipient of a 'Bigfoot' spotting on property I own in Pennsylvania. The 'Finding Bigfoot' team made no specific reference to location, thank God, but the filming clearly proved to me where they were - on my property assuming it was public land. Frankly, having lived there for 25 years and hunted most of them, this seemed to be the most preposterous story I'd ever heard. Then, this summer, I actually met the guy face to face that saw it. Now I'm not so completely sure....

Luckily I'm boundaried by public land and my 'spot' is narrow enough you can see across it, so I've had no wave of "hunters"....yet.... but I can be sympathetic to what it would be like if this were more widely known.

Then I don't see it as being, "extraordinary" evidence, then its just enough evidence to identify it.


Sctt

I know of a guy who has a very rare airplane sitting on his property. There's a real legend about the plane, many people don't believe it exists. It does, I've sat in the cockpit of it.
He says hardly a week goes by he doesn't find someone on his property looking for the thing, especially since you can't see it on a satellite image due to the trees overhead. And he says they're never nice. They all feel it's their right to go anywhere to look up old airplanes and that he's somehow wrong for 'hording' the plane. Many demand he sell said plane to them (of course, always for a very low amount). He's even had to threaten some creative uses for buckshot on a few of them (this isn't a cantankerous man, and if anyone's ticking him off that much, they must be really working at it).
It's the entitlement mentality at it's worst, and I'm glad I don't have that problem...

Those guys sure are annoying, aren't they?

They also walk the line of being both the forum operator's friend, since they generate lots of traffic, and their worst enemy as they annoy folks and drive them away.

That's the part that so many people seem to forget. There's a reason these things were left out on the woods. Usually it's because they're junk, and weren't worth retrieving.

That's not always true, some perfectly good locomotives have been stranded when a line washed out or a bridge collapsed or whatever. Mt Rainier Scenic RR's #17 was stranded in the woods due to a forest fire, and remained there for 20 years until Gus Peterson trucked it out.

However, those locomotives were few and far between to start with, and I suspect they've all be recovered. Even if not, 50 years of sitting in the wood or buried in a tunnel (let alone submerged in a quarry!) is not the best method of preserving an inactive steam locomotive.

Finds do still occur. A while back the Oregon Coast Scenic RR retrieved a Heisler Locomotive that had derailed in Eagle Gorge and was transformed into a "Little Engines Live Steamer" style craftsman kit with some parts missing. (Little Engines live steamers were advertised as "Just bolt 'em together!", but in practice often required far more work than that.) It was one of those find easily dismissed as an urban legend, but it did exist, and through a lot of work, it has been recovered. I have no idea what progress, if any, has been made on restoration.

So, they may be out there, but they're very few and far between these days. At one point, we may have to admit we've found them all, and any that were left have rusted away beyond repair.

Oh, and for those of you who think that Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster couldn't possibly exist, Google Coelacanth, they're supposed to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period, but apparently they don't know that, so a few still survive.