Concerning the 3 Santa Fe steam locomotives that went into the Kaw River back in 1951, a friend of mine from Kansas just advised me that South Platte Press has published a book about the incident. Entitled "The Santa Fe Railway and the Lost Locomotives of Topeka", it is written by James J. Reisdorff and the late Lloyd E. Stagner. It is soft cover, 56 pages and retails for $19.95. Be interesting to hear from someone who purchases the book, and their review of it.

Les

Yesterday there was a story on NPR about archeology. The discussion strayed on to Great Lakes wrecks, there was a mention of Lake Erie car ferry going down in 1909, it hasn't been found yet and it was rumored to be gold in the ship's safe for a payroll, so people are out there looking for it. It sailed from the port of Conneaut but the name of the ship wasn't mentioned.

Prof. Hilton's Great Lakes Carferries book has the story. I think it was the 2nd car ferry named Marquette & Bessemer No. 2. The cargo was about 29 hopper cars of coal. A letter to Railroad Magazine about 1960 claimed that a fisherman friend of the writer might have snagged some hand brake wheels from the wreck.

Continuing a discussion in this topic from Wed Nov 14, 2007 9:57 pm, the Electric City Trolley Museum Association's "News Bulletin" for Feb. - Apr. 2012 (which includes April Fools' day) mentions an award of Scranton trolley 324's truck rebuilding to Lyons Industries. It had been part of a tavern since the 1930s.

I won't go into where (I won't be responsbile for starting a new "lost anything" legend), but there was a long standing rumor of a complete railroad shop and all the tracks still standing, abandoned in an area I used to live in. Locals said a logging company went belly up at the end of WW2 and locked the shops and walked away and it was all there. Problem was, people couldn't agree on exactly where it was, and nobody could tell you where they'd "seen it" (always, they could never remember when it was either). I found the info on where said shops were through a friend who was a private detective who owed me a favor (he said it only took him five minutes to find it and this just before the "everything is on the internet" times), found the company that owned the property, got permisison and went in to look. I found the site, the tracks had to have been ripped of decades before due to the size of the trees on the roadbed. The ties had completely rotted away, no rails or spikes could be found. It'd been stripped clean. I found the shop site, the only thing left was a collapsing inspection pit wall and nothing else. If it wasn't for a deep pit I found that was on my military contour map of the area, I'd never have found it (this map was drawn in the 60s and didn't show anything, which should have been a strong clue).
Even still and with maps and photos, the locals WOULDN'T believe it. So many of them said, "I saw the place not that long ago and everything was still there, you could have run trains through there with no problems." Some even claimed to have seen locomotives and cars still in place, ready to run, as late as a year previously. Naturally, none of them could point it out on a map or even tell you the general region when challenged.

Did anyone else experience a massive case of deja vu in reading p51's post above? I could swear I read the exact same story sometime/somewhere prior to today...but maybe it was just a dream.........

sc 'doc' lewis

It's the summer rerun season...

OK, cue the whirling and whistling sound of the mother ship hovering over the "locals." If this was in northern California, I might guess the locals were smoking some of their crop growing up in the hills.

Sigh!

You probably did. I posted that in another thread a while back, and thought it was relevant here.

No problem, p51, it's just that I have my 60th in a couple of weeks and find myself making "double takes" to make sure my mind isn't playing tricks. You're right, definitely relevant to the thread topic...carry on!

sc 'doc' lewis

My local favorite is relatively recent - I even remember the wreck.

Would have been about September 1975, on the Erie-Lackawanna main line at Waterboro Jct (NY), main (original Erie) track. A westbound derailed on the junction crossover and made it about half a mile further west toward Kennedy before everything went everywhere in a 60mph heap. I got a look at it before cleanup.

But the local legend, that was sworn to by residents, is that an entire 60' auto parts boxcar of brand-new Artic Cat snowmobiles, still in crates and plastic, was pushed into an excavated hole in the adjacent farm field and buried. Not the car, just the lading.

Now in rural western NY, that's the next best thing to Inca gold. I ended up moving near there in 1984, and walked it several times. No trace except derailment marks on ties, but the rumor persists to the point where metal detectors had been attempted.

Along the lines of Mr. Gustafson's post, is a similar one from my area.

Legend among the local car enthusiasts of our area has a train wreck back in the early 70’s along the former B&O mainline on “17-Mile Grade”. The wreckage was supposed to include a boxcar full of new in crate Ford 351C-4V "Cobra-Jet” Cleveland Engines.

According to legend the boxcar and several other cars went over the embankment above the Savage River dam in an area that prevented their recovery. It is supposed that the railroad just dug a pit and buried the wreckage with no effort at all to salvage the remains.

There is always someone, that knows someone that has seen the wreckage before it was buried or has actually dug in the area and found the side of the boxcar in question, but was unable to find a door or other means to access the interior of the car.

This legend again surfaced in late 1985 after a train hit a wash-out on the mountain during the WV floods of November of that year. That wreck claimed the life of an engine crew member when the GP7 or 9 he was riding in rolled down over the side of the mountain. Stories ran back then that after the crew member was recovered, the Chessie System simply buried the locomotive where it laid as part of the fill to repair the washout.

TimWilson

I think the source of these "urban legends" is the SOP of pushing wreckage aside to rebuild and open the mainline, then coming back to haul out or scrap the badly damaged cars later. What people really see when they gather at the wreck is some really big Cats shoving wrecked cars down the embankment... they come back a week or two later and those cars, or the pile of lading is gone. Must'a buried it, right?

That's pretty much the standard of practice i've seen while working for NS the past 20 years! They call Hulchers or R. J. Corman in to clean up the mess as to open up the main line asap and the derailed/wrecked cars are shoved off to the side and for the most part are cut up on site within a matter of weeks. I've seen some cars that didn't look to bad that were cut up. I do have to wonder though about those derailments back in the 1960's and 70's when wreck clean up efforts were not such a big deal with the EPA ect.

When i first hired out on the RR i heard several stories from older railroaders about derailments where whole carloads of damaged goods were buried right on site and some were verified by other crew members who actually saw it happening. I don't think they buried whole box cars but you never know! I know guy's i work with have told me they have seen some gons in a river somewhere between Cleveland and Alliance, Ohio that derailed and went down over the embankment that the RR never bothered to recover.

Another fellow railroader i work with told me that 25 plus years ago when he worked for the signal dept. His supervisor had the crew dig a big hole with a backhoe and bury boxes of surplus extra outdated signal parts from lens, old switchlights, ect. A now retired conductor told me the same story as he even saw them doing it while sitting in the siding next to where they did it.

Here's one that i didn't believe until i saw it with my own eye's! A few years ago a friend of mine told me there was a buried RR car on the side of the hill bewteen the tracks and creek on the curve near West Main Street in Norwalk,Ohio from a derailment on Sept, 27th 1969 on the N&W currently the new W&LE. I told him he was full of it and he said "come on you don't believe me i'll show you!" We walked back to the site and he was 1/2 right. It wasn't a whole car buried with wheels, body ect. However it was the good majority of a box car floor with center sill with the end torched off still loaded with several layers of bricks! See attached picture of the car after the wreck. The coupler pocket/ drawbar and end of the car sticking up was torched off but the rest of the car at ground level going down the bank was still there but now pretty much buried with some of it's load. Makes one wonder about some of these stories! Anyone need any bricks!

When I was in college, 45 years ago, a Pennsy train en route to Wilkes-Barre wrecked up the river from Bloomsburg, Pa. The line was across the Susquehanna River, and I was involved with several folks who used boats to cross the river and salvage items from wrecked cars. This included multiple sheets of 3/4-inch plywood -- enough that one guy built a garage. There was other lumber, new tires, and many, many, many blocks of "government cheese." I was so sick of cheese everything by the end of the semester that I could hardly stand it. The railroad police and wreck train guys saw us hauling stuff off, but they were much more interested in getting the line open. There were only two cars on that train that anyone was worried about. They were a boxcar full of bottled whisky and a tank car of wine. State troopers were guarding both of them!

A couple of years later, I was at the site of a wreck on the PRR main line, and I saw with my own eyes a bulldozer crushing a row of brand new Cadillacs, all with only minor damage on one side. From that wreck, I was able to salvage a couple of cases of toilet paper and a couple of paper towels, enough that my wife and I didn't buy any for a year.