The train legend may very well be true, but this tourism angle changes the whole context of the search and the skill and credibility of the searchers. What got my attention to this possibility is this from the article I linked above:

Arkadiusz Grudzien, the spokesman for the mayor of Walbrzych and head of the City Promotion Office, said in an interview that tourism in the town was up 44 percent from the previous year.

“The publicity the town has gotten in the global media is worth roughly around $200 million,” he said. “Our annual budget for promotion is $380,000, so think about that. Whether the explorers find anything or not, that gold train has already arrived.”

At one point, someone suggested to me that the treasure hunters had staged a hoax in order to con people into investing in the search. Then when the investments piled up, they would abscond with the funds. I suppose that would be possible, but I was skeptical of that because it would be difficult to pull it off.

The Loch Ness promotion of false sightings by the couple in order to promote business for their hotel seems quite plausible. Likewise with this tourism angle with the hunt for the lost train. With the lost train, something like this is the only thing that could explain finding nothing where a fantastic ground penetrating radar image has to mean that finding nothing would be impossible. That is a major credibility problem, and it needs an explanation.

At this point, the treasure hunters would have to go out and demonstrate the production of the GPR image in a way that proves that the GPR is actually producing that image.

Hey, I never said the sightings were "false." Just pointed out a coincidence.

(Now, other "sightings" and photos have turned out to be identifiable as other things, or in the case of the famous "Surgeon's Photograph," an outright hoax.........)

Okay, I see. I just jumped to that conclusion when you said they reported seeing the monster bounding across the road with a sheep in its mouth.

Throughout this gold train story, there have been many suggesting it is a hoax. That term seems to attach to any lost treasure stories. If nothing else, it may be just the expression of natural skepticism and incredulity. I have seen it attach to lost locomotive stories.

The term hoax means a deception to mislead, usually with a specific motive. There have been many famous hoaxes with a variety of obvious personal motives. Some say that Al Capone’s vault story was a media hoax on the public. The motive there would be to hype the mystery for ratings, in which case, the confirmation of the legend is entirely beside the point. It may be that the producers of the show had been inside the vault prior to the staged opening and found that nothing was there. They may have placed the couple gin bottles there as a prop. All that mattered was the story and the money to be made by getting people to watch it.

Up until this point, I had confidence that the Nazi gold train story was not a hoax. I could not see a clear motive, and I perceived the treasure hunters as being credible heroes fighting a skeptical bureaucracy. But now I see flaws in their methodology, their weird and incomplete explanations for the flaws, and an adoring media that is blind to those flaws and conspicuously incurious about anything of the methodology. I also hear how important the tourism generated by this story is to the local economy of this depressed town.

Couple this with the spokesman for the mayor of Walbrzych and head of the City Promotion Office saying, “Whether the explorers find anything or not, that gold train has already arrived.” It is pretty easy to connect all the dots.

The searchers tried to keep it quiet but it all leaked so they had to go with it.

They would have found the same thing. They didnt know, we didnt know, they went on a hunch.

There was some clue about Jimmy Hoffa remains under some home driveway around Detroit, they went ahead and dug it up, found nothing, which put to rest all the media hype.
There were Elvis Presleys sighting everywhere after his death till a network show featuring Elvis's closest friend debunked the sightings, the sightings reports ended.

The Search guys I think will keep on trying.

I don’t think they went on a hunch. They had ground penetrating radar proof that something that looked like a train with military tanks was there. It may not have actually been a train with tanks, but it had to be something complex, mechanical, and probably manmade.

Nobody digs holes like they did just on a hunch. There has to be some type of evidence, if only a treasure map drawn by somebody who witnessed the burial. They claimed and showed extremely solid evidence, and now we are supposed to just forget that ever happened.

Indeed the treasure hunters will keep trying because trying alone is highly lucrative. They will either find the bonanza of the actual gold train; or they will make big money by entertaining the tourists with the continuing searches.

Actually, we were not at all sure about that one. There was way too much legacy code out there with no still-employed (or even living) soul fully understanding it, and not enough really competent people to vet everyone's code at once. (Since many of them were working in dot-coms not Y2K.)

The best you could be sure of is that your trusted employees in your company were as "on top of it" as they knew how to be. There was no Y2K czar with his finger on the pulse of the worldwide situation, talking with every company to accurately gauge their compliance and looking for potentially explosive interactions.

Talk about making money from a myth--my first wife ran a Scottish import shop here in Southern California and when things were slow she'd make stuffed toy "Nessies" to sell in her store and at Highland Games. Some of them are still around--my brother and his wife took one on a trip to Scotland and got photos of it at its "native habitat.

The deathbed admission of the Nazi soldier is still enough to keep searching, the radar analysis was enough of a coincidence to dig where they did. There may have been circulating rumors/clues about a hidden train but perhaps no hardcore evidence where to look.

I just wonder if there are any track plans of the area in that time or aerial photography of the area near the time the train may have been buried (if at all). If theres a sequence of mappage to check, something could clue out.

Having just spent a few days in Wroclaw (Breslau as was...), I was rather amused to see that one of the Kolej Dolnoslaskie (Lower Silesian Railways) electric multiple units was carrying "Zloty Pociag" (Gold Train) branding on it when I saw it at Wroclaw Glowny station yesterday!
Obviously someone else has decided to jump on the publicity bandwagon.......