GoodDay Everyone! I have a question regarding the Susie Q 141 2-8-2 Chinese Mikado? My question is this. I understand the Susie Q 142 had a sister the 141 which sank on a Norwegian freighter in the Bay of Bengal? Does anyone have any more information regarding the 141? Did the ship capsize and what would be the possibility of recovering the 141 if one had a millionaires pocket book? How would one extract the locomotive and tender from the ship? How deep did the boat sink? And what would be the damage to the locomotive and tender? How would one go about recovering the engine and tender and stop the disintegrating once it was raised? Then how best would one go about rebuilding a locomotive that has been underwater for some many years? I know it does not make much sense to recover the locomotive? But lets just say for a moment we are pretending. Alot of the information here I would consider valid in regards to the efforts to recover the two little steamers off the coast of New Jersey as well? I believe they are from the NYC elevated lines? Robert
If it was worth retrieveing the 141 from the deep, it would have been done then or by now anyway. And I am not sure the NJ steamers is a real story or that they, too, are too far gone to retrieve…it is a story that pops up every once in a while. Perhaps in a hundred or so years, the value and cost will be worth the trys. At the time of the 141’s trip into the deep blue, China was still making steamers and there were several other new Chinese steamers here when this happened, so the insurance bought one of them for NYSW to use. You can probably google or bing out the info…dates can be found in indices for TRAINS, etc. or NYT or WSJ.
Referencing the two locomotives off the New Jersey Coast, there are several sites that record information on them.
This is one : http://njscuba.net/sites/site_locomotives.html
and here is a You Tube video from 2008 of the two 2-2-2 locomotives:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE4IbZj5JS4
As for the TangShen (b:1989) Mikado (2-8-2) bought for NYS&W (#141) it was sunk in the Bay of Bengal (date of loss(?) the information seems to indicate that the vessel capsized in 6,000 feet of water. The vessel was apparently the Norwegian-flagged S.S. BRAUT.
As I understand it, the two sunken locomotives off the Jersey coast have been “adopted” (if that’s the right word) by the New Jersey Museum of Transportation/ Pine Creek Railroad of Allaire State Park. They hope to raise one or both of them one day, but the big problem (as always) is money. As for salvaging the Susie-Q 141, well, it would be a heck of a lot cheaper to rebuild and refurbish an old steamer that’s on dry land to begin with. 141’s gone for good.