Narrow gauge panel track is easy to lay on flat surfaces. Logging RR’s used to lay temporary track on all sorts of uneven ground, so a frozen body of water is child’s play. The engine could very well have been a vertical boiler donkey type used to not only haul flat cars of ice blocks on and off the lake, but had a crane on it to lift the blocks out of the water to the flat cars.
Put the tracks next to where the blocks are to be cut, cut the blocks, run the engine out with a few flat cars (2 on each end?) lift the blocks to the cars, run the “train” to the ice house, move the tracks over a few feet and do it again. The engine could even run the saw to cut the ice.
The “engine” could be used in the “off seasons” for moving ice out of the ice house or maybe it belonged to a logging company within 100+/- miles of the lake and just “borrowed” for a couple of months in the late winter.
Losing the loco in the lake could have been an accident while using it as a crane to lift the blocks, might not have fallen “through” the ice, but into the hole left by taking blocks out. Could also have fallen though because when taking the blocks out, you are lowering the level of the water in the lake, leaving the ice (the track is on) out of the water such that it is not “floating”, but a “bridge”. Horse drawn ice sleds have fallen through because of the “bridge” collapsing.
The Ice Road of “Ice Road Truckers” is built each winter by the government highway departments. They go out and drill holes to test the thickness and quality of the ice. They also drive smaller trucks out when the ice is estimated to be thick enough (some brave driver!) and that truck drags a ground penetrating RADAR behind it (I’d push it on a looooonnnng pole!) to test the thickness of the ice. And it is run periodically during the season (as well as drilling more
Well, I live about a mile south of the Antioch, IL limits. The county is “Lake County, IL.” 1) The eastern boundary is Lake Michigan and, 2) there are a whole lot of inland lakes. The lakes are used for recreation spring, summer, fall, and winter. In fact, this area is called “The Chain O’ Lakes.”
Except for mild winters the inland lakes freeze over with ice thick enough to support ice fishing and snowmobiling. There are various bars along the lake shores. Apparently, the snowmobilers move fast over the frozen lakes visiting these various bars. Well, whatever floats your boat (or snowmobile). The only way anyone could get me to go ice fishing would be to put a gun to my head. It’s the same with boats in the summer. Float from bar to bar. But women are wearing bikinis in the summer. So that makes it interesting.
Every year, it seems, the fire department has to go out after one or more snowmobilers who have crashed through the ice. The divers generally recover the earthly remains. The fire department has an air boat that allows them to transit ice, thin ice, and water.
I can’t imagine anyone being stupid enough to think the lake ice around here would support a locomotive of any type. But, as we all know, the world is full of stupid people.
Who knows? Maybe the locomotive is in close by Rock Lake. Maybe it’s not. Who knows? The fire department didn’t have an airboat and divers back then.
While it does not suprise me that some one has tried small steam engines on ice, I doubt that they repeated the idea very often. It’s a good thing that a few men could re-rail a small engine. I don’t know that I would want to be standing on ice around a steam engine that had been stranded there any length of time. Every time the loco goes down the track, hot ashes are falling thru the grates. That plus the sun on the ash and ties would exacerbate the problem of the weight of the ties and rail and trains causing the ties to melt into the ice and snow. Ice fishing shanties have to be constantly blocked up to keep from freezing in. You would need all the men to chip out the ties all at once to move the track, or periodically just to keep it from freezing in too far. The linked video shows the men moving the cut section of floating ice toward the icehouse, where there were ramps that moved it out of the water like they did with logs at a sawmill.
It looks like Rock Lake is about 30 miles north of the east-west boundary between Wisconsin and Illinois. It is hard to say what would be plausible for hauling harvested ice by a small tram over the frozen Lake. People have always taken chances with running equipment on ice. It always works fine unless they break through. In northern Minnesota, there is Many Point Lake which is said to have a loaded log train sitting on its bottom. Ice on frozen lakes is surprisingly flexible, so keeping the load moving could have been a key to continued success.
But I have to wonder if the legend of a train in Rock Lake actually stems from ice harvesting. These legends go back into the 1800s, and there is a lot of lost history dating back to that era. The earlier a legend originated, the more details have been lost to time. Eventually, the legend becomes abbreviated to a train being lost in a lake. But then new details are added over time based on speculation about the core of the legend. Those new detail are pure speculation that is then attach to the core. So as time goes by, the legend persists along with its true core plus a lot of errors in interpreting the details surrounding the core.
If Rock Lake was used for ice harvesting, that fact would likely be well known. So the core of a legend dating from earlier, and largely forgotten, could easily become attached to the ice harvesting operation by speculation.
I notice that as the lake extends south, it is crossed by the Glacial Drumlin Trestle, which is apparently a trestle used by a historic standard gage railroad in that area. I have not researched this, but there are reference
Visit many north country lakes in the dead of a good, cold winter and you’ll see full sized pickups on the ice, often parked next to ice fishing shanties. The curb weight of a full-sized pickup these days is on the order of 2.5 tons.
Safe ice thickness for such a truck is generally shown today as 12-15". The foolhardy may well take a truck out on less than that, which may not be a problem if the ice is “blue,” ie, very solid.
Our local utility has been known to drive line trucks over the ice to work on islands.
Ice harvesting usually occurred when the ice was a foot thick. Depending on which guideline you use, that could support upwards of a 8 tons GVW truck.
Another possibility is simply using the frozen lake as a shortcut to bring cut timber to market. One method for hauling logs was the Linn tractor, which often hauled multiple sleds of logs - resembling a train.
I’m pretty sure the Rock Lake that is the subject of this thread is just across the border (barely a quarter mile) from Antioch (I live in Kenosha, WI). If you go on Google Maps and pull up Antioch, IL, then go straight north and just a tiny bit west, you’ll see Rock Lake to the west of Hwy 83. It’s bordered on the west by Rock Lake Rd. The CN mainline (former Soo Line) runs just east of the lake, so a rail spur in this location would be very plausible.
Kenosha County had a very robust ice harvesting industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In fact, it was a major winter commodity for the Kenosha & Rockford (later Chicago & Northwestern) line that ran west from Kenosha through Bristol and Twin Lakes to Genoa City and Harvard, IL (most of it was abandoned in the 1930s). Part of the old rail grade is now the “Ice House Trail” running east from downtown Twin Lakes to Bassett.
Okay thanks. I see it just north of Antioch. I had found a different Rock Lake near Madison. Usually, if any wreck is in a lake, and not buried in the bottom, divers would readily know about it.
I live in northern Michigan, where people often drive their pickup trucks on the frozen lakes. A few decades ago the local Lions club would have a fundraiser where they would leave an old junk pickup on the ice, and run a pool to see who could guess the date and time when the vehicle would sink thru. Even after draining the crankcase it would still leave a mess, so now they use a tiny shed tethered to the shore. But still it seems like every year, local news reports some ones pickup would break thru the ice. I once thought about driving on the ice, but insurance would not cover it, you have to cover the cost of recovery, and then pay the environmental fine.
I did ride once in a large horse drawn sleigh on the ice. From that I know about how flexible the ice can be. They say the horses know when the ice is safe, and will refuse to go out on it if it’s not safe.
So I know quite a bit about the Milwaukee Road Ice Operations from living in the Lake Country of Waukesha County, WI. The Ice would never get thick enough to support a train on it so no they would not lay spurs onto the frozen lake surface. As stated previously the very most they would do would have a horse and buckboard go out on the lake to gather the Ice but most of the time the Ice was not thick enough for that. Primarily what they did was cut channels into the lake and float the ice to the shores after cutting it then use ice tongs onto a buckboard with sawdust, they used a lot of sawdust from local sawmills to seperate the ice into layers and to keep the layers from melting and freezing together.
The railroad spurs as you called them were usually along the mainline and only to an Icehouse. The Icehouse would be regionally supplied by local lakes and buckboards and would be of primarily batten board type wood construction. They would fill the ice houses with ice up to the part where the roof line started and again use sawdust to seperate the ice layers and cubes from one another. The railroad would use refer cars and either haul the ice into the cities (for industries such as breweries that used lots of ice) or they would send them to various locations along the line where they would have a need to re-ice a refer while in transit (not always a large city).
Amazingly in Wisconsin the Ice would not all melt in the high temperatures of summer in the ice house and some of it remained well into the next winter. Milwaukee Road had a lot of sidings in the lake country in various hi
This thread is reminiscent of the (very) long-running sort of controversy on RyPN about ‘locomotives sunk in flooded quarries’. As with Hissos ‘formerly the property of Alfonso XIII himself’ the rumors are far more numerous than the actual engines and cars… sometimes notoriously. Len Shaner is one of the more famous poster children for this trope…
My uncle was a diver with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department in the 1960’s. They did a vehicle recovery (no lives were lost) one year after a carload of kids ventured onto the ice, I think it was with a Corvair.
The ice “bellied” under the weight of the car, making it uphill in all directions, thus impossible to drive out of. The kids bailed and the car sunk.
WELL!!: It is not the Discovery Channel;but it is the HISTORY Channel ! [:-,]
Deja vu , all over again! [oX)] “The Curse of Civil War Gold” Apparently, it is scheduled to pick up again this Spring.[2nd season, after a 1 yr delay.]… More TV to binge watch while self-quarantined! [8-|]
It comes more than a year after the finale of the first season that ended on a cliff hanger when the stars of the show reviewed a dive video that they believed revealed a partially buried gold bar at the bottom of Lake Michigan near Frankfort.
They’re searching for $140 million worth of gold bars believed to be in the lake.
“One thing you can’t do is, you can’t quit now,” said Michigan-based treasure hunter Marty Lagina at the conclusion of “Curse of Civil War Gold.” Lagina also starts in a similar show “The Curse of Oak Island.”…”[(-D]
So where are Chad T., and his popcorn machine, now ???[dinner][swg]
In the 50’s, My father took us, the whole family, ice fishing on Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron off Tawas City, Mi. He drove the car out on the ice to fish. At Tawas he drove a mile or so out as I recall. Hated those COLD!!! trips, but he was a diehard fisherman. He gave up after 3 or 4 tries, probably tired of all the complaining.
There is indeed a locomotive sitting sunk in the mud West of Rock Lake. There is a basic description on the Tyranena Brewing Company website. The wreck is located somewhere between Lake Mills, WI and Cottage Grove, WI on the Glacial Drumlin Bicycle Trail. Another highlight of the trail is that there was a robber’s hideaway, back in the 1800’s. Sadly, I was on the trail recently and the signs for these sights seem to have disappeared.
If that was done at all as a practice I would think it would be fairly rare. As mentioned earlier primary methods used were horses and sleds or just floating the ice blocks from the center of the lake to the edges by people walking alongside cut canals with ice pick poles. A number of railroads in SE Wisconsin had small Ice House sprurs to local lakes including the Milwaukee Road. The spurs were not very long from the main branch or mainline. Milwaukee Roads Twin Cities Mainline went through a large patch of ice producing lakes in Waukesha County and in that circumstance the spurs went just a short distance from the mainline to reach the ice house. Pewaukee Lake was a large producer and had two large ice houses next two it at one time and several large resort hotels within walking distance of the passenger depot. It is amazing how similar Ice Tongs and Railroad Tie carrying tongs look in appearance. I tend to believe there was some dual use going on there. A friend of the family had old Ice Tongs for harvesting he found scuba diving a local area lake in Wisconsin that he also used to carry old Railroad ties away to use for landscaping…see below:
Have biked that trail, too. Former C&NW. It’s thought that there are pyramidal structures deep in Rock Lake. Nearby Aztalan is an archaeological site thought to go back to 1000 AD. Even found to have artifacts exhibiting cannibalism.
Don’t rock the boat man. Your going against the narrative…heh-heh. [:D]
On a less sarcastic note, I think the railroad history of Wisconsin in particular is a really fascinating one, expecially the narrow gauge lines in the SW.
I remember reading a long time ago that in the very early days of railroading, one winter New York City experienced such a river freeze that a track was laid across one of the rivers. It may have been the Hudson as I believe the freight cars (only) went from NJ to NYC. The hauling was done by horse power one car at a time and a decent distance seperating the cars while crossing. Keep in mind that the earlier freight cars were tiny midgets compared to today’s.
Supposedly, the last cold cycle ended in the US sometime in the late 1840’s but for sure by 1850. Then the weather started changing to the warming trend that continues today. But the final years of the cold/hot cycles are supposedly the most extreme so it would have been darn cold during those 1840’s winters in the Northeast. The most famous of the cold years was 1816 when it snowed in July. [Actually about a 3 year period when an Italian valcano erupted in 1815 and darkend the sky over Europe and North America for almost 3 years.]
