dinwitty said: "there is a power pole at the corner of a street intersection where the line ran, and a spike is jammed into it. Nope don't see how it assisted climbing."

A surveyor probably placed it there for a benchmark or when running a bench circuit - pretty common practice around here. At the railroad contractor I used to work at, we sold spike kegs on a fairly regular basis to survey suppliers who would then resell them to surveyors. Sorry to get off topic....

It doesn't, but it makes for a dandy surveyor's benchmark. Easy to place, easy to find, and not likely to be disturbed. They're fairly common. You run in survey from the real benchmark, and then pound in the spike, find the elevation and use that for your TBM (Temporary Benchmark) on the project etc. Next time you need to check an elevation, the spike provides a known elevation to start with.

On a related note, surveyors like to drive PK nails into ties for the same reason. I've always wondered if a project ever got messed up when a tamping crew came by and gave the track a 2 inch lift, unbeknownst to the surveyor.

While restoring our former C&O work car/troop sleeper we found old 1940's style razor blades behind the wall as each end of the car, which makes sense since there were washrooms at each end when it was a troop sleeper. I know many of the standard Pullman sleepers had slots in the walls for the sole purpose of razor blade disposal. I assume the troop sleepers had the same feature if we found blades behind the walls.

I can remember nearly 50 years ago when my family took a ride on the Black Hills Central (the 1880 Train), and we had ridden the train between Hill City and Keystone. Halfway up the line at a point known as "Oblivion", there was a pretty good start of an outdoor railroad museum.

On the grounds of this railroad museum were several pieces of antique railroad equipment, and while I am not sure exactly what was there at the time, there were a couple steam locomotives. My Dad at the time was in the habit of shooting a lot of standard 8 motion picture film, and he helped me climb into one of these locomotives. Dad had shot some footage of me leaning out the fireman's window of this 4-6-0.

The one thing that I noticed about the cab of this locomotive right away is that the upholstery of both the engineer's and fireman's seats had been slashed with a knife and the stuffing was coming out. In addition to that, people had tossed beer bottles and other garbage into the firebox! I was maybe 7 years old at the time, but old enough to understand that this was wrong. How the hell are you going to run a steam locomotive with glass beer bottles and other junk in the firebox??!! It is very sad and I've never forgotten it.

As a side note, this same locomotive is an ex-Chicago & Northwestern 4-6-0, #444, and Rick Mills, who had written a number of books about railroading in the Black Hills of South Dakota, told me that the Forney Museum of Transportation in Denver had acquired her several years ago.