I couldn't find any postings of proof there is indeed a locomotive there, however I did see on a few websites that National Geographic channel has only spent some $100K out of a $450K budget trying to figure out what is there.

It is not like this is money being robbed from one restoration project to feed another, or anyone here is insisting the spending of others money. Rather this is one guy who has sold a rather compelling story to a television company and the money he has had committed wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the fact that they either A. Believe there is a locomotive down there, or B. Believe there was enough of a story down there to make for an interesting TV show.

Either way this guy has spent most of his life dedicated to first finding a tunnel most people wrote off as long gone, then telling everyone that there is a locomotive down there that few people think exists. So he gets some magnetic readings and in the very place he said the locomotive should be, the readings he produces by a reputable firm show something that looks about right for what he describes. Even if the actual documentation and or oral history is rather sketchy to say the least, far as I can tell he has the money lined up and ready to go. At this point it seems that all that is stopping him and the rest of us from finding out what it is on those magnetic readings are as far as I can see is a brutally painful overly bureaucratic city government.

So count me into the camp that would love to see the city ok him finding out what is actually down there. There was a video of Diamond on cities of the underworld I found (can't find the link) where he is telling the host that behind the wall is one of the subway stations intact with the locomotive sitting at it. It would be pretty cool if that were the case.

As far as what do you do with a locomotive if you find one down there. 52000 square feet of real state in up and coming Brooklyn may be worth more than you think especially if accompanied by a compelling story and a lost engine display down there. You don't have to be a die hard railfan to be captivated by a story of triumph, corruption, and hard work from the 1830's. If you built proper entry ways it wouldn't be hard to imagine the right developer turning this into an interesting attraction with some shops or something. An inplace display of even a rusty lost locomotive would likely be pretty interesting.

If you can't develop the space which she sits in I still think there are many places that would love to host a display of one of the earliest steam locomotives to run in the USA and tell her story and with it the story of historic NYC.

On a locomotive this old should it actually exist with that much story behind her I don't think the rust is really going to be that much of a detractor. Just the story alone is what will captivate people. Alexander do we actually need to steam up the USS Monitor in order for it to captivate a whole load of people?

"Steaming it up" is not the issue. But you chose an interesting example.

The preservation of what little was pulled up of the Monitor in 2002--still 120 tons of turret and 80 tons of artifacts and debris--has absorbed about a half-million dollars a year for ten or so years. And the public still isn't close to actually getting to visit it. The Confederate submarine Hunley has similarly absorbed millions of dollars in just preservation/stabilization expenses since it was raised, never mind tens of millions proposed for a museum for the sub, the land for said museum, etc.

Now, this loco was not under salt water for over a century (well, not quite, we hope). But this site is publicly-owned property, and if the loco is there, it's a publicly-owned asset. Properly making this underground site publicly accessible will cost lots of money, and it's not going to be cheap, because they will have to do their damnest to accommodate everyone from the obese patrons in scooters to the people who have trouble walking down stairs to the asthmatic or claustrophobic. And for what? The people willing to spend $15 or $20 to have Mr. Diamond guide them down a manhole are few and far between.

We have far better, more interesting, more educational, and more popular attractions that are having troubles keeping the doors or gates open of late--zoos, art museums, symphony halls and opera houses, science museums, athletic centers, etc. I have a half-dozen museums in my own city that, by any measure, have failed the "if you build it, they will come" promise, and one of them is the oldest inner-city railroad station in the United States, which only got reopened as a Civil War Museum for the 150th anniversary of said war by leasing out half its space to a for-profit bookstore franchisee.

I"m not keen at all about the way the city refuses to either "solve the riddle" or work with folks interested in figuring out what might be really there--they're acting like there's something to hide. But from the potential liability to the city of either renegade explorers or the cost of accommodating and maintaining an attraction of somewhat limited interest, this can easily be defined as either a "Pandora's box" of "can of worms" that any smart legal counsel would tell the city to avoid opening at all costs. For a "return on investment," the abandoned plans to restore access to the old abandoned IRT City Hall subway station as part of the NYC Ttansit Museum would be a far more productive use of time and money. But where does that project stand?

I agree an underground subway only museum probably won't work but there are several very neat shopping malls and or other trendy attractions built into very interesting historic buildings/sites around NYC. The tunnel as it stands has over 52,000sf of floor space so that could be worth something to a developer and it is apparently in good enough structural shape to support the city above.

If said locomotive is actually there, and it is impossible to exhibit her in place I have to think this is something a large museum geared to the story of NYC would love to have. Just think of the stories the thing tells. There are a few items where the rust only adds to the story that goes with them. Rust on the side of train cars deteriorating because the museum who took them can't afford to maintain them really doesn't look good, however rust from 150+ of sitting 20ft below city streets, in a hole a few 1000 Irishmen dug, on a project organized by the very men who built NYC, in the world's first ever subway project, that was then covered up by a greedy corrupt shyster. Now that is rust that actually tells a story. If you can get it up and stabilize it I agree with you it doesn't fit with in most of the models of railroad museums we have out there today, but I think it would fit very well within say a major metropolitan science museum that also tells much of the city's history.

By the way how many pre civil war era steam locomotives actually exist today?

By the way with the Monitor what are the challenges/long term goals with displaying her. As far as I am concerned clean her up a bit and allow the public to see her. Once again the rust is just a part of her story/history at this point.

At this point you've gone from preservation to commercial development. Suffice it to sat that this has its own perilous implications, not the least of which would be the infrastructure demands of such underground development. Not... Gonna... Happen.


I've seen any number of museums constructed to serve or display specific objects that purported to have a much broader mission of "setting the subject within the broader context of social history," "highlighting its ties to local and national importance," blah blah blah. Doing so to at least some extent is important, but anyone realistic about the long-term prospects of such a museum has to acknowledge that, in the end, what draws people are George Washington's false teeth, Dorothy's ruby slippers, the T-Rex skeleton, and/or the DeLorean from Back to the Future. I'm dubious of the idea that this (purported) steam locomotive and/or the tunnel are "enough." Yes, yes, by all means it's worth stuffing and mounting in the Museum of Brooklyn History. But, once again, we're back to who pulls it out and pays that cost. Hundreds of thousands if somehow done privately, millions if done by a city entity.


John White Jr. identified 24 pre-1870 American-built steamers intact in a feature article in Trains in September 1984, including one each in Cuba and Chile, but not including any underwater or purported underground locos. This figure, of course, doesn't include numerous foreign-built locomotives abroad.


It's not just "rust." Go do your own research. Long story short, long-term exposure to salt water fundamentally changes the metallic structure of a metal object, most especially iron, most especially cast/wrought iron before the era of mass-production steel. The only way to keep an iron object from literally crumbling into mud when retrieved after decades in the ocean is a very long-term desaliniation process--years or even decades in this case. You don't just brush off the rust. This process is long, time-consuming, and expensive.

Conservation of submerged metal artifacts is a long and technically demanding project...... and custom made for the specifics of each artifact's condition. "Rust" is an irresponsible oversimplification of something much more complex that can lead to rapid total loss if not correctly abated. Even artifacts that were only in damp areas can be damaged by exposure to different atmospheric conditions without conservation treatments.

We had 3 large electrolysis tanks going in Savannah for smaller metal artifacts when I was working there - and that's only the beginning.

dave