Digging out old ties in the Danbury Railway Museum railyard we found this pin buried about a foot down. It is probably something common or it wouldn’t have been left , but we don’t know what it is yet. The pin shank is about 1 1/2" diameter and 4" long with a dome head about 1/2" high. It appears to be forged and has the raised mark C10 on the dome. The track is an old stub siding and the piece was in the ground adjacent to where a switch had been removed some long time ago. The rail above the ties is dated 1905 and the ties are ancient though we haven’t recovered any marking plates on the ends of the ties yet. Anyone know what we found?
what does the other end of the pin look like? is it finished or does it look like it has been broken or sheared? Most of the description looks like a pin from a link & pin coupler - but the length is too short.
The key is going to be determining what possible usage it could have had at that location. Two idea pop into my mine. One it could be some ofrm of track bolt used to hold lengths of rail together with the threaded end broken off. Hence it just being discarded. Or it could be part of the throwbar mechanism for a turnout.
It is a knuckle pin…was looking at the heads of them today as we were switching…the same stamp is still used…this one is sheared off or broken…nothing unique about that, broken pins are all over the place in a yard.
Thank you all for the replies. Didn’t think we’d found anything special but it bugs me to not know what it is we’ve unearthed. In checking with some of the ex NH folks at the museum, it turns out the switch had a history of putting cars on the ground. It was removed some time ago though we’d like to put one back in the same location as the adjacent track is now not connected at either end. Here’s another view of the pin in question showing the bottom. The angle could be better, but the bottom shows signs of shearing.
