I don't want to start another "0-6-0 in a quarry" thread, but a very interesting story was posted three hours ago on BBC News. I'm not sure it's a preservation story yet, but it is history, so (for now) it's probably good on this part of the forum:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33994483

If this turns out to be true, it could be a very historic story in several respects- Nazi crimes, railroad history, human interest, and with any luck (if there's anything left to preserve), railway preservation.

Should be interesting to watch, at the very least.

Steve Hunter

So the BBC is reporting that Polish media are reporting that a Polish law firm says two anonymous individuals it is representing say they found a train hidden in a tunnel?

I can't count the number of found 'armored train' stories I've heard over the years. There was even one of a Russian armored train found in Bosnia by some IFOR troops. The version I heard was a joint USMC/British Ordnance Corps group extracted the entire train (with a steam locomotive) and moved it... somewhere.
Problem was, you could never find any hard data on it from anyone.
Classic urban legend. No evidence, vague description of what and where it is, and all 'info' coming by second, third, fourth or fifth hand...

I look at it like this... If you can find a fully intact tank in a bog in eastern Europe, chances are that some of these "urban legends" might have some credence to them... Key word here is some... Me? I'm just waiting to hear about some Churchill that got dug out of the mud still in one piece.

...so somebody found something on a hidden buried train somewhere nobody knows and nobody is identified so the whole thing is just a big ghost story of nobody having nothing to do with anything nothing it might have gold bars, it might be radioactive lead or whatever, maybe we find the body of Hitler in there or whatever nothing? Is this what I get? I big non-story?

uninquiring minds dont want to know -the National Apetheticierer-

so now whut...

so they found the train and want a piece of the action like finding a sunk ship full of gold N stuff...doing it all in information undercover know nothing see nothing Colonel Hogan..

The media is buying into this, but it sure seems like they snuck some sarcasm into the story: http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/20/europe/poland-nazi-train-mystery/index.html
The thing is, there wouldn't be tons of gold and explosives on the train. There simply wouldn't be a need to transport both. Blowing up the gold would just scatter it (and not all that far), so that wouldn't make any sense. No sane military would transport a treasure alongside any considerable amount of explosives (other than some grenades or man-portable anti-tank weapons in case of ambush), in a place where the Allies would have had full air superiority long before the train vanished.Not even remotely the same thing. A bog is vast and a tank can go anywhere. A train... well, it can't exactly go wherever it wants. Even a kid knows a train can only go where the tracks are. That's why I don't buy into this at all.
There have been so many urban legends of hidden WW2 trains over the years (none of which ever turned up anything), I couldn't possibly count them all.

If they have found something, the "tunnel" in question may not be a rail tunnel, which is what immediately springs to mind.

This wikipedia item explains what was built in the area towards the end of WW2...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Riese

I would have thought that the Russians would have thoroughly searched the area post 1945, and one of the Polish news sources mentioned in the BBC report mentions the NKVD (Soviet secret police) operating in the area for a number of years after the end of the war.

I will be surprised if they have found anything, but will see what is said further over the coming weeks.

As an aside, there is a complete (diesel powered) German Wehrmacht armoured train preserved at the Polish Rail Museum in Warsaw, believed to be the only one in existence (at the moment....).

They should call Metro North. Maybe a "Nazi gold train" could be added to the FDR armored train ruse. :-)

There was a piece on this in the (London) Times today. They said that the "train" has been located by ground penetrating radar, so nobody has actually seen anything other than some sort of radar image, and they don't know exactly what it is comprised of, let alone what is inside the thing, so the "gold" aspect is rather speculative at the moment!

This is beginning to remind me of Bob Diamond's lost LIRR locomotive in the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel in Brooklyn.

On the other hand, another mass grave was just located today, apparently by the same method, confirming old rumors of another atrocity in a villasge. I didn't bookmark it, but expect more details will come out about that as well.

It'll be interesting to watch but not get excited about... if a train of almost any description really is found, it'll get much more interesting, whether or not anything is actually on board.

My take on the "explosives on board" thing is that they might have been used to seal the mouth of the tunnel, bunker, or whatever it's supposedly hidden in. And, the track outside would have needed to be removed pretty fast, or the Russians would have done a lot more snooping.

Steve Hunter

So how did this train end up being buried?

I used to have access to what the DoD knew of Russian activity in the Warsaw Pact nations regarding German caches and such. Make no mistake, they went through everything in regard to what might have been left behind. The idea that they wouldn't know of a RR track during the war, especially one going into a tunnel, is downright silly.
The NATO militaries had weapon/equipment caches scattered all over Germany and Austria (and supposedly in the Low Countries as well) in case the Russians overran Western defenders in any "WW3" scenario. Make no mistake, the Warsaw Pact had the same thing on their side of the Iron Curtain. What is known now is that especially in the 70s and 80s, the Russians were convinced that the West would try to take a page from Hitler's playbook and head East again.
My point here is that Poland was relatively untouched by combat in WW2, at least not as nearly as France, and Low Countries and Germany were. The Russians did an exhaustive survey of what was there during Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky's tenure as the Polish defense minister in the immediate postwar era. Then, there's the idea that Poland ditched the Warsaw Pact in 1990, so something that was known at all and somehow got missed by the Russian 'puppet government' not turning up then is, well, silly. It's simply laughable that something of this importance would have been missed for all these years.