If the topic has come up before, I know I'll get a beating.
Has anyone gone to the location of historic line side wrecks and poked around for remnants of the involved cars or locomotives? While most materials, heavy materials, get picked up as scrap or salvage, I'm certain smaller items were tossed off as insignificant at the time. By this I mean broken number plates, headlights, markers, etc.

I know of at least one site in Gideon, Maine, where a locomotive stack was dragged out of the woods.

One summer afternoon during a dry spell, I went out with a couple friends following up on a tale of a logging lokie left out in the woods near the NC / VA border north of Raleigh. We found a mention of a logging railroad in a handwritten history in the local library, found a ghost of the grade near an old house by a mainline railroad, but no hardware. Broadening our search, out in what was a swamp but then parched, we found a long riveted sheet iron stack with a diamond on top, probably from a steamboat wreck, but nothing else nearby. We left it there for future searchers.

Here in south western Pennsylvania the three foot gauge Pittsburgh Southern was very good at plummeting down embankments and falling off of trestles. I poked around a few wreck sites with a metal detector and found decent amounts of hardware such as links & pins, part of a journal box, part of a stub switch... Much of the r-o-w is on land prime for development, and small pieces disappear every year. Finding remnants of a narrow gauge that lasted about seven years is a lot of fun. No smokestacks yet, but part of a drawbar was found wedged into a tree.

Here in Colorado, quite a few bits and pieces have been found scattered around the steeper parts of the abandoned grades, especially near Alpine Tunnel. One friend has a D&RGW rotary snowplow blade that broke off when it hit a rock, and also a South Park washout plug that blew out under pressure as one of their engines did summersaults down an embankment. There should be plenty more where that came from...

A lot of bits were salvaged in the 60s and 70s from the Great Northern snow slid wreck at Wellington, WA.

In 1961, a PRR special heading southbound to the Bowie (MD) race track derailed turning from the NEC to the spur that led to the race track, due to excessive speed. Two E8's and several cars ended up on the ground, six dead and 200+ injured. A couple of years ago, I ventured back to the site on a warm late winter day, before the normal summer rain forest could grow up.

There was, what looked to me judging from the location to be part of the lead E8's draft gear half buried. There were other scraps of metal around. No doubt a metal detector would find a lot. Some of the spur has been turned into a path. A lot of ties/rail is still left though. It is low ground, so boots, awareness of snakes and insects are the order of the day.

Bob

At "Leaman" interlocking, MP 57.0 on the Keystone Corridor, there are still vestiges of a WWII wreck on the then PRR to be gawked at in the Pequea Creek drainage. Wheelsets, bolsters and the like. (This is 110 MPH territory, so it should go without saying that one should approach the site without trespassing on SRC or NRPC property ...)

To me, this is no different that poking around an abandoned railroad line. Other than trespassing issues, I see no problem with it.
If it was the site of a wreck, even a fatal one, what harm are you doing by removing a rusted grab iron or a bolt? None that I can see.
I'd love to go see the site of the Wellington slide someday, but I doubt I'll spend a full day driving/hiking up there, when there's an active rail line so near by.
I sure hope not.
This is really common for airplane crash sites. There's a whole hobby of going to places where airplanes ran out of air in the wrong spots, and many of these folks will look for fragments of aircraft, especially odd/famous/rare ones. A pal of mine in the USAF recently found the site of Chuck Yeager's NF-104A crash and found tiny fragments from the plane. I assume the Air Force might officially have issues with him walking off with them, but really, what harm did he do?

Around 1963, Reading Company's Saturday inbound Newtown Local derailed near Bryn Athyn. It was relatively minor but in the cleanup they found car parts from a 1921 collision and fire where 27 were killed in the same curve.

Phil Mulligan

On June 15th, 1915 a north bound double head consist on the Carson & Colorado Railway was in Nevada when there was a derailment on a fill and the second engine (# 14, 4-6-0 ng) rolled over and down the fill. The wreck killed both crew members. The whistle, whistle lever, two safety valves, flow bowl, and atmosphere valve were buried in the desert. The wreck was cleaned up and the engine repaired. A few years ago, an enterprising individual was driving the old right of way and recognized the wreck site from a photo taken of the wreck. He dug around and recovered those artifacts. He gave them to NSRM, and they are on display.

There is a smashed CNW tender with no frame just next to the right of way in lower Wisconsin, I believe the line had originally come out of Bain heading west. The line is long gone.

I have been taken to the site by the individuals mentioned. There is congealed oil from the tender under the windblown dirt and sand.

I have researched the incident and wrote about it for the Southern Pacific Narrow Gauge Historical Society. There were two ICC men in Mina at the time and they prepared a formal accident report; also there was newspaper coverage. The two fatalities were the fireman and the brakeman. The engineer survived with scalds as the the roll-over was to the left. One of the boxcars in the mixed train broke a brake rod which then caused it to derail pulling, bouncing for about 300 feet before rolling over and pulling two more cars and the 4-6-0 over. The leading 4-4-0 and the rest of the train remained on the track and probably bought the injured into Mina (the gauge change location) and the two fatalities died that night on the extra train carrying them to Reno,

The embankment is high enough that the recovery of the locomotive involved rolling it all the way over before building a temporary track to get it back up on the railroad.

These photos of the wreck might give an idea of how and why the top of the steam dome was left behind in the desert.

Many moons ago a friend and I took a hike over the Tranquille ‘foothills’ along the CN mainline in Kamloops B.C. to visit the wrecksite of a 1920’s passenger train derailment that resulted in the locomotive winding up at the bottom of Kamloops Lake (where it remains today). For those unfamiliar, the CN mainline in that area snakes around the shoreline of Kamloops Lake with steep, vertical ‘mini mountain’ rock cuts on one side and the lake on the other. The accident occurred when an Eastbound fast passenger rounded a blind curve just before entering a tunnel, hit a rockslide and the locomotive along with several cars rolled over into the lake, demolishing a trackside MOW section house in the process. As you can imagine, there were many fatalities.. The site is isolated and difficult to get to overland without 'walking the tracks', so back in the day the CNR did a rudimentary cleanup/repair of the site but owing to the remoteness, left a lot of debris in place. When we finally got to the site after one Helluva mountainside hike, we were rewarded with grounds literally littered with artifacts, even after almost 80 years. We found LOTS of broken CNR china, shards of boiler jacketing and chunks of lagging, bits and bobs of piping, a smashed airbrake/boiler gauge, a BIG brake rigging live lever as well as plenty of broken glass. Though 80 years of soil erosion and the elements had softened the ground features, the swath of destruction the locomotive/tender/cars left as they rolled was still very apparent (including the remains of the section house which it hit square on and obliterated). We didn’t take any big souvenirs, so I assume the site is still as it was nearly 20 years ago. For those looking for an adventure, the site is at the curve just before the West end of the daylighted Tranquille tunnel/rock cut.

Another fun tidbit – I grew up in a small farming community outside of Ottawa, Ontario in a village called Russell. The New York Central ran through my town up until ’57. Anyhow, back in 1927 there was a major derailment in between the villages of Russell and Embrun that resulted in a ten-wheeler plowing up the trackbed and the cars zig-zagging all over the right of way. The locomotive dug into the ground and came to an abrupt stop, breaking the bell bracket off at the base and sending the bell into places unknown. The site was cleaned up and life kept going. Fast forward to the early 1990’s. The abandoned right-of-way was turned into a bicycle path and while the excavators were working on the site, low and behold what did they find? The long lost bell. The construction gang, who had no idea about the history of the site was used to finding nothing but rocks and long forgotten culverts were absolutely bewildered….

One last one – August 16th, 1959 Canadian Pacific #8 ‘The Dominion’ was rear ended at track speed by a freight at Gull Lake, Saskatchewan. No one was killed but the virtually new Budd built, stainless steel rear observation car ‘Fundy Park’ bore the brunt of the impact and was completely and utterly blown to smithereens. CP picked up the pieces, dug a pit beside the mainline and shoved what was left of Fundy Park into it. Skip ahead to the 1990s and the pit was accidentally rediscovered by a B&B crew laying fiber optic cables. Among the twisted pieces of stainless steel they pulled out were the two cast aluminum Canadian Pacific beaver shields and 6 foot long ‘Fundy Park’ nameplates that had once adorned the side of the car.

Interesting stuff, you never know what’s out there until you go looking.

73, RwC

Another few 'long buried railway relic' stories for you –

Back in 2006 I was a member of CP’s 2816 steam crew. Our ‘home base’ was the Ogden Shops in Calgary, Alberta and at that time we used to store the passenger cars in an unused area of the compound. That same site was where Canadian Pacific scrapped a large number of steam locomotives in the early 1960s. In fact, the entrance to the compound was marked by a big set of ornamental, gold painted arched gates the shop crews made from boiler tubes – the ‘Pearly Gates’ for steamers as it was. I don’t know if those gates survived Hunter Harrison’s cleanup of Ogden, but they were visible from the corner of Ogden Road S.E. and Millican Road.

Anyhow, back to the passenger car track. As you can well imagine, cutting up dozens and dozens of steamers with oxy torches is a messy business. The scrappers cut the locos up into small pieces and those pieces were bulldozed into piles to be collected and sent for scrap. With all that earth moving, it was inevitable some parts got buried.
When I was there, part of my duties included servicing 2816's fleet of passenger cars which involved crawling all over, inside and underneath them (blue flagged of course). That gave me the opportunity to get to know those grounds very well and almost daily I would find some bit from a steam locomotive. Staybolts, staybolt caps, trust plates from tenders, rivet heads, water strainer screen mesh, handrail stanchions….all sorts of things. Talking with the ‘old hands’ at the shop, the grounds had been steadily giving up parts for as long as anyone could remember, especially after heavy rainstorms.

Speaking of Ogden, I got to know a fellow who hired on in the early ‘70s who’s first job was to destroy the old coal oil switch-stand lanters that were being phased out at the time. As the switch stand lanterns were being swapped out with reflectors, they were collected from all across Western Canada and sent to the Ogden shops for ‘disposal’. This fellow recalled ‘boxcars arriving daily FILLED with those old lanterns’. He was given a hammer and told to ‘smash out the lenses, smash the burner, crush the body and throw the remains into the pit’. “The Pit” was the used crank case oil dump. This is pre-environmental regulation days back when it was standard practice for the railway to dump used crank case oil into a big open hole in the ground…Anyhow, being 18 and working unsupervised, he quickly learned that he could dramatically increase his productivity (and lengthen his smoke breaks) by skipping the smashing part and just throw the lanterns straight into the pit where they would sink out of sight like a pre-historic animal into a tar pit. Several years after, the site was conveniently paved over, turned into a parking lot and many years later the land subsequently sold off. He showed me the spot, so for any of you who have heard the legend, I can confirm it is true, there’s potentially several thousands of H.L. Piper 4 lens switch lanterns, train order/semaphore lights and brakeman’s hay burners, all protected by oil sitting about 6 feet under an un-assuming parking lot in South-East Calgary.

And one last one. There used to be a 26 stall roundhouse at the CNR division point in Biggar, Saskatchewan. When the railway ceased steam operations in 1960 and centralized diesel maintenance to the Transcona Shops in Winnipeg, they no longer required Biggar to be a classified as repair-capable facility. Large items like the McCabe flanger and the wheel lathe were collected but the smaller, now obsolete hand tools were ‘left to be disposed of as the Foreman saw fit’. Useful tools went home with the shop crews, but everything else like pneumatic rivet guns, cylinder boring machines, ect were dumped into a full length inspection pit and simply paved over. I spoke with quite a few former shop employees in Biggar and they all said the same thing – ‘If your looking for steamer stuff, there’s a goldmine buried out there’. The roundhouse was torn down in the early 2010s, but foundation is still there. The land is still owned by CN and is adjacent to the transcontinental mainline, so I doubt they would be too keen to permit a bunch of railway nuts to have a go at the pad with jackhammers and backhoes.

While we're on the subject of the former Biggar shops, another spot filled with goodies was/is the shop spur known as ‘the burn track’. This was a ¼ mile spur that ran off to a raised embankment – almost like a tipple – where crews would burn the old wooden vans (cabooses), passenger and freight cars to get easy access to the metal parts. Once the car was burned, the steel was salvaged and anything else was shoved over the side of the embankment. This practice went on for decades and as a result the surrounding land is covered with artifacts. Though now overgrown with thick vegetation, I managed to find remains of McClary pot-bellied van stoves, CNR dining car china, fire scorched hulks of coal oil marker lamps, melted dining car tableware…and all sorts of freight car hardware like brake-club era stem winder wheels, door latches and slides, grab irons, you name it.

Again, you just never know what is out there waiting to be found.

73, RwC

Royal, that was one of the best talks I've yet seen regarding artifacts. Thank you so much! I know there was a similar practice at Brownville Jct., Maine, when the roundhouse was pushed into the old turntable pit.

I wondered if the Luria Brothers site in Medina, Pennsylvania would be a treasure trove. PRR four legged markers, number plates, classification lights, other "jewelry" of the steam era.