Since lost trains seem to be a popular topic here, I submit this from the local news station.

http://www.wral.com/lifestyles/travel/video/8150131/

Great story, retold by people who don't know a GP9 from a ten-wheeler! Before somebody suggests "we go get it", think of how little is left, and the condition of it.

There's a legend of another 4-4-0 that is buried under a highway intersection not far from there also, and a Shay near Black Mountain that nobody seems to be able to find.

I was waiting for some shots of what the scuba divers found :-( Considering the dam that flooded the reservoir wasn't built until 1947, there is a very good chance that what was left on the ground was cut up and hauled away during the WWII scrap drives.

I still have not figured out how you would hear a bell ringing underwater.

It must be possible - it appears in a lot of ghost stories and folk tales. Since many people base their lives on such things, how can we question the veracity?

Another report on the locomotive:

http://www.durhamblogger.com/2010/11/be ... story.html

There's an interesting post in the Comments section as well. Bear in mind that this came out after the news video was broadcast.

I only do locomotives in quarries.

It would be interesting to learn the exact know history of this legend. It is not that old, and with the specifics that we do know about the site, I am surprised that we are left to rely on such fragmented information as is being passed along.

How deep was the water when the train broke through the trestle and hit the water?

How deep is the water now?

Was the collapsed trestle rebuilt in the same location, or was the route changed?

If there is a train standing there on a hard bottom in say 50 feet of water, then surely sports divers would have explored it. They would have taken photos. Where are the accounts and photos?

Andy,
Sound travels better and further through water than air, all they have to do is get the clapper to hit the bell or strike it with a rock, and anyone in the water will hear it.
Rich C.

Can someone tell me what the video content is? I could get it to open on my computer, and I tired 4 times. I just keeps buffering...
Yeah, it'd be easy to get a bell to ring underwater but it wouldn't sound exactly the same as it would in the open air.

I had trouble loading the video as well, it took awhile. The content is a hackneyed telling of the story of a trestle that went across a small lake. It was burned in a forest fire in 1918 but the damage was considered superficial and was allowed to remain in service. But the first train across, a locomotive pulling 3 cars, fell through the trestle and into the lake. The locomotive dove into the lake and impaled in the mud remaining in a vertical position. Apparently, no attempt was made to salvage the wreck. The water was shallow enough to allow kids to dive on the locomotive and ring the bell. In 1947, a dam raised the level of the lake to the point where it was 50 feet above the wreck site. Supposedly two divers found the locomotive and one car a few years ago. And that's pretty much it.

Most locomotives under water are either too deep to gain reasonably easy access or they are buried in the mud, and not offering any visible evidence. I know of a "lost train" legend at Devils Lake in Pine City, MN that has readily inspired divers to look for it, but I surmise that it is buried in the lake bottom. That part of the lake was originally crossed by a trestle carrying the Lake Superior & Mississippi RR built through there approx. 1870. Later the trestle was filled, and I conclude that the fill buried the wreck.

Many have looked for the wreck resulting in the lost train by searching the old newspapers, but nobody has found it. During the first seven years of the railroad's existence, there were no local newspapers published around Pine City. So I suspect that the timeframe of 1870-1877 was when the wreck occurred if the legend is true. So the prospect of finding newspaper coverage rests with the larger newspapers of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth. These are daily papers, so it would be a daunting task to search 2,555 issues times at least three papers = 7,665 newspapers, and probably 4-8 pages for each where the coverage might reside.

And then it is quite possible that the wreck happened and no paper covered it. A good rule of thumb is that if there were any fatalities, the newspapers covered the wreck.

Ringing the bell seems to be what everyone does with a sunken locomotive. It seems to give the story a ring of truth. This includes a locomotive in Lake Washington here in Seattle that was never there.

Yeah, I do find it funny to see that so many people saw this thing over the years... now, nobody can tell you where its at, at all.
People will just continue to tell those stories, leaving folks like us to wonder if it ever existed at all.
I won't go into where (I won't be responsible for starting a new "lost anything" legend), but there was a long standing rumor of a complete logging railroad shop and all the tracks still standing, abandoned in an area I used to live very close to. 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 permission and went in to look. I found the site, the tracks had to have been ripped out decades before due to the size of the trees on the roadbed. The ties had mostly rotted away but you could still see them 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.