Soo Line 1024 is in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Here's a photo from parkengines.railfan.net

parkengines.railfan.net

rjenkins@railfan.net

Maybe Joshua heard some of these during his tenure at Steamtown...

There's a DL&W 4-8-4 in Java...

The original DL&W locomotive "Spitfire" was dumped in a coal mine...

Then there is the sad but true story of how the DL&W wanted to give a "Pocono" class 4-8-4 to the City of Scranton for display in Nay Aug Park. Seems the City didn't want be bothered with moving it through town and wanted instead to hoist it up the hundred foot verticle cliff to the park from the mainline which ran below.

Seems the DL&W wasn't too keen on this idea and so the engine never made it...

Dave Crosby



bing@epix.net

...Looking at a logging locomotive picture in my collection...one cut up for scrap in 1938....in Pennsylvania......

"Yeah, the bell on that engine is still on a post outside my fathers hunting camp out in California. They ring it to bring the guys in from the woods"

But you know what?

After two years of checking...detailed analysis of pictures, and tracking the story through a couple generations....

IT WAS TRUE!!!!!! The bell DID survive..and travelled 2500 miles....



randygustafson@stoneconsulting.com

> Where is Soo #1024 now?

Thief River Falls, MN. Information and several photos at the link below:

Soo Line #1024
dougb@sunserver.com

This statement may be a myth in some cases but not all. Santa Fe shopped their big steam power right up to the end in spite of the impending doom. The 2921 located in Modesto was the lowest mileage 2900 in the donated batch with a scant 9,000 miles on her. Of course it isn't the mileage or lack of mileage that has done in these locomotives and as everyone knows it was time and weather. The 2921 now looks like she had a million miles on her

I've heard lots of buried, sunk, and lost locomotive stories, of course. The recent photos of the one in the iron mine in Missouri would have to be a recent true development; wonder how many more like that there are.

My five favorites, all but one of which are local to me:

* The c.1840s or so steam locomotive thought to have been buried in the Atlantic Ave. tunnel in Brooklyn. My understanding is that nothing has been found to date.

* The steam locomotive said to be part of the fill in the miles of leeve around the Atchafalaya swamp in Louisiana.

* The steam locomotive with a leaky trottle that is said to have ran itself and a train off the bridge in Berwick, LA; along with the civil war locomotives said to have been sunk by one side or the other at the same spot.

* The remains of a Manhattan El Forney on the shore of Lake Verret of Hwy 1 outside of Morgan City, LA. Finding out the exact identity and history of this locomotive via the internet was one of my first great insights into the research power of the net.

The steam locomotive in "Blue Hole", a former quarry about an hour or so north of here in Rockland, TX. This quarry is where some of the granite on the Galveston seawall came from; and had a steam train and a steam shovel in it.

Story goes that a sinkhole opened up during the night. When the workers came back to work the next day, there was not a trace of either the train or the shovel; but instead there is what is now called "Blue Hole".

My pastor swam in it when he was young; and a diver who supposively dived in it saw some rails, lots of stolen cars and 45 RPM records that were thrown into the lake.

It is now private property; the hunting club that owns it supposively fished all the cars out, and dynamited the cliff that was a popular diving site into the hole to deter tresspassers. Haven't heard of the train or the steam shovel ever being found.

-James Hefner
Hebrews 10:20a

> I was thinking the other day that as a
> novice kid and as an adult volunteer I've
> been bumping into what we now call
> "railway preservation" for better
> than 35 years... seems there are certain
> urban legends or myths that are eternal.
> Here are my favorites. Enjoy and add yours.
> jim

> "A ______ (fill in the blank with type
> of locomotive) is _____ (buried, hidden,
> stranded, lost, fill in the appropriate
> blank) _____ (in a river, in a ditch, on a
> mountain, in a swamp, fill in blank as
> needed)."

> "The ____ (fill in name of railroad)
> was going to donate a ______ (fill in name
> of premier type of engine on line) to ______
> (civic group, town, NRHS chapter, museum,
> etc., fill in as needed) but it was turned
> down."

> "All she needs is about $2,000 worth of
> work and a fusee to run again."

> "Somebody wants to buy the steam
> locomotive that's been in the junk yard for
> 50 years? Gosh, it's worth a million bucks.
> Maybe the Smithsonian will want to buy
> it."

> And my all time favorite... "It was
> shopped just BEFORE it was put in the
> park."


Steam Along the Mississippi Delta

james@survivingworldsteam.com

After living in Kentucky all of my life, here are some of my favorites.....

-There's a Big Emma (L&N 2-8-4) buried by the transfer table pit at South Louisville/Where the roundhouse used to be/at the DeCoursey yards near Cincinnati/In a coal mine/at the Ravenna yards. Actually, when the University of Louisville built their football statium where the shops were, the only thing they dug up were some rusty tools, that probably dated from the 1960s. And the scrapping of every single Big Emma was chronicled by a couple of photographers, although several tenders have survived.

-L&N 152 was completely overhauled by South Louisville before donation. Yeah right, that's why it had nice little valleys worn in the wheels, and a worn out everything.

-CSX is going to rebuilt ths rest of the Lebanon Branch/The missing middle of the old Monon in Indiana.

-South Louisville shops was going to rebuilt our L&N E6 until the bean counters showed up.

-Kentucky Railway Museum was offered, but turned down an IC Steam locomotive in operating condition/an L&N Big Emma/a Soutern steam locomotive/etc.

-Amtrak is going to bring back the Floridian and the Auto Train out of Louisville.

david.wilkins@bardstown.com

> Then there is the sad but true story of how
> the DL&W wanted to give a
> "Pocono" class 4-8-4 to the City
> of Scranton for display in Nay Aug Park.
> Seems the City didn't want be bothered with
> moving it through town and wanted instead to
> hoist it up the hundred foot verticle cliff
> to the park from the mainline which ran
> below.

> Seems the DL&W wasn't too keen on this
> idea and so the engine never made it...

> Dave Crosby

I heard that some official quipped "thats our past not our future" and thats why the Pocono never made it to Nay Aug.



superheater@rrmail.com

* Allen Cooperage Co. two truck Shay #1, Lima/431/1893; said to be sunk or buried in the swamp in Alan (near Port Gibson), Mississippi.

* A Shay said to be abandoned in the woods off of I-20 in Louisiana.

* A sunken Shay AND an abandoned steam dummy from the Garyville Northern RR. in Louisiana. Have talked to someone who actually climbed on the steam dummy in a shallow area surrounded by trees out in the woods. He was a child on a hunting trip when it was shown to him; the person who knew where it was is no longer able to go into the woods, and he has no idea where it is now. There is also trackwork and some cars in the swamp east of what is now Garyville, LA; a steam dummy mounted on a barge and half sunk in a canal is also in the area.

* Repeated claims of other such equipment abandoned in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Basins.

-James Hefner
Hebrews 10:20a


Steam Along the Mississippi Delta
james@survivingworldsteam.com

In 1977 when we moved AT&SF #3768 out of the park the idiots came out of the woodwork. We had all kinds of kindhearted souls giving us advice about what condition the locomotive was and wasnÂ’t in. We were fortunate to have one of the chief mechanical guys from Topeka still working for the railroad that was around when they donated the engine to Wichita. He was a wealth of knowledge and dispelled a lot of the BS that was floating around. This engine had set in KC for several years as a ready and serviceable locomotive before its donation in 1957. When it came to Wichita the still had a tender full of Bunker C fuel oil, which had to be removed. As we researched the shop history of the locomotive we found that it had been shopped just prior to being placed in the storage line and it was also one of the locomotives that had received a welded boiler in 50/51. It now sits in our museum and every so often I will be talking to a group of people and someone has to tell me all about the engine, most of which isnÂ’t true. I just smile and nod and think to myself if you only knew. One interesting fact is that prior to this engine being sent to Wichita while they were getting it ready to move in KC it took a trip into the turntable pit. It went in tender first and damaged the engineerÂ’s side of the cab roof and did some major damage to the buffer between the engine and tender. We found that when we had them apart to turn the locomotive that the parts for the buffer came from the Blue Goose. They numbered everything when they took them apart and to our amazement we had Goose parts.

johndeck@cox.net

G. Mark:

> Another good one...

> "It'll take up when it gets hot"

That is the boilermaker's version. The coach electrician's version is:

"It'll [the genemotor] pick up on the road".

> Finally...

> "They buried all the spare parts in the
> turntable pit"

The Lackawanna version (from when I worked for Steamtown Foundation) "They dumped the boxcar full of Phoebe Snow china off the Long Pier in Hoboken to get rid of it".

Steve


SZuidervee@aol.com

There's some logic in having a zero-mileage engine at the end of steam.

Under the old rules a flue job was good for 5 years and the clock started when the engine was fired up. It made some sense, if a road didn't need a freshly outshopped engine right away, to store the engine and run the engines whose flue time clock was ticking. If d-day came before the stored engine was needed, there you are.

I believe this happened with Reading 2100, 2101 and 2102 in 1957, but R. Co. found something to do with two of the engines.

Electric City Trolley Museum Association

Not locomotive related, but rumor has it that several boxes of New York Central dining car china exists in the rat infested, water filled basement of Buffalo Central Terminal.

while riding behind a MRS-1.

According to Holland's Berkshires of the Nickel Plate Road, there was a fairly large number of NKP Berks that were shopped and immediately stored, some without being broken in.

Included in this list of zero-mileage Berkshires were 755 and 759.