Back when i was a kid I lived within walking distance of the St Lawrence & Atlantic, a railway that was completed in 1851. It belonged to CN then, and it saw maybe one to three trains a day. In the summers we used to walk along it (there was no internet back then) to see if we could find things, my thinking was that workers had built that line and that maybe I could find some vestige of their presence some 120 odd years later. Sure, enough, I found a pick, a couple of shovels, a hammer, a coin and some Indian arrowheads from the 1700s. The tools were not altogether unexpected…I took them to the local college where it was confirmed that they were at least 100 years old and were probably left there by workers who built the line. There’s probably alot of treasure still left untouched although nowadays one can’t really explore without getting into trouble. But if you’re walking along an old line then the best place to walk is 20 to 50 feet out from the track…in the brush or in the woods. You might be surprised at what you find.
All I ever find are drunks and broken beer bottles.
I’ve done a little of that, my pastor has some land that’s adjacent to an abandoned line that was pulled up sometime around 1980 or so. I’ve found spikes, tie plates and the such, but nothing “major” or “interesting”, then again, I never really had a long time to spend spelunking like that, so maybe that’s why I haven’t found anything horribly significant.
Who knows, maybe my next day off from work I’ll go do a little more wondering.
In my case it helps that the St Lawrence & Atlantic hugs the St Francis River for a short distance, so there’s alot of history between the river and the railroad. The railroad was built about 20 years before steam shovels and other machinery became available, and that probably explains why I was able to find the tools relatively easily…many must have been used to build the line. Much has been written about the construction of the transcontinental lines, but there’s not much available about the less well known lines like the St. Lawrence & Atlantic. It was completed when photography was in its infancy, so very few photos exist…in fact I’ve never seen any showing the line under construction. The lack of info adds to the mystique, at least for me.
Sometimes I find Kalmbach employees along the tracks… [(-D][swg]
In 1981 I travelled west on a CP coal train from Kamloops, BC. The engineer and brakeman enjoyed pointing out interesting sites along the track. About an hour out of Kamloops the engineer suggested I go out on the engine catwalk and look down. I did…and way waaaaay down in the ravine was a rusted old hulk of an American standard 4-4-0 steam locomotive lying on its side.
I found an old wood-handled mallet of some sort, and also an all-steel (metal) brake shoe.
I also tend to see alot of refilled water bottles…[^o)]
Ed
I found an old wood-handled mallet of some sort, and also an all-steel (metal) brake shoe.
I also tend to see alot of refilled water bottles…[^o)]
Ed
Refilled water bottles…don’t see any of those up here… wonder why that would be given locomotives have toilets on board.
Golf balls. Granted, the line does run next to a golf course, but there are lots of trees between the course and the ROW and I sometimes wonder how in the world the ball made it all the way through.
[8o|]IBC’s, shovels, wrenches, track brooms, spike mauls, speno droppings, bodies, ball peen hammers, my chaining pins from 20 years ago[:$], old survey points, china shards (Mimbreno et al), OTM that matches nothing in place now, pole holes, edison battery acid bottles, railcar parts…
There are lots of ancient iron parts and pieces buried along old railroad roadbeds. A metal detector will find something about every three feet. Most of the detector hits are spikes and track bolts, but more significant items are to be found as well. They can tell a story, and have quite a mystique when you get them washed off and sitting in your living room. Usually, they have no intrinsic value, but as symbols, they are tangible pieces of an age of railroading that is older than the direct memory of any living person. So that old iron can speak.
There are some items that are very expressive in their complexity, and obviously railroad related, but they absolutely defy any clear identification of what were used for. Most people are familiar with the stamped steel journal box covers used on cars with brass friction bearings. They can be found, but there is a whole generation of journal box covers that preceded the standard stamped steel covers.
Hope the metal thieves don’t read this - they’ll be out digging up railbeds… They’re already stealing rail.
A few years back near Roundout while pulling up to a red signal I found a young couple naked and doing you know what … I thought that was more interesting than old iron…
Randy
Randy…that’s interesting. They were reading to each other? Ha ha…
Thank You.
I found a 1/2 inch long length of rail (vertical slice). I intend to polish it up and mount it on a plaque of some sort as a presentation piece. Just can’t figure out what to have engraved on a brass plate for the “presentation”.
I have assumed that it was cut off of a replacement rail to make it fit. The only flaw was that the cut did not complete properly, but instead the piece broke off when the cut was almost all the way through. The cut off piece is whole, the part that broke came from the stock side. This left the last inch or so of one side of the foot thicker (longer) by about 1/4 inch (the curf width). I used a hacksaw to cut that small imperfection off. The piece I cut off looks very much like a miniature axe head; with a little grinding to dress it up a bit, I will drill a hole vertically in it and whittle a wood handle for it to make a minature axe.
I remember one pileup that occurred around here many moons ago. There was a load of lead ingots in an old DM&IR gondola with a wooden floor. These ingots were blocks of lead about the size of that traction motor in Ed’s thread. One broke through the floor of the gondola in a train running about 50 mph and made a big pileup. I am not sure about the exact number, but about a dozen of them are still buried out there. They picked up a lot of them, but some just got lost in the shuffle with the dozers moving things around.
The one that first broke through the floor was spit out into a dry swamp, and punctured its way about four feet deep into the swamp floor. You could tell it was the one that derailed the train because it was all chewed up. These ingots were naturally drab gray, but where the wheels and truck parts caught them, they were very bright silver shiny.
The Apalachicola Northern ROW in the Florida Panhandle was built mostly through swamp for mile after mile. Somewhere along the way there was a modern AN 50’ boxcar lying on its side, covered with kudzu and still loaded with a cargo of paper. I was told by the crew that it will remain there forever because it would be too difficult to try to lift it out of the muck. This was 20 years ago, so I would imagine it is still there, only more covered with kudzu.
John Timm
I’ve ran across this a time or two while working. Better than rusty metal or old loser lotto tickets.