Ringo58
Ever since I was a kid I loved trains. When I found out that there was an old trainline that passed through my neighborhood in the 1920s I wanted to find out more. I live in Antioch IL. There was a small ice house spur that got ice from the lakes around me. Ive always heard that there is a train in Rock Lake wi after the ice got too thin. Does anyone have any information to back this up? or more info about the ice spurs? Anything is greatly appreciated!!
If you are really interested in this legend, the key is to research the historical record. If this legend is known by a number of people, start out by asking them for any details they have heard. See if you can find any consisitency in the details. Most of all, try to establish the date or timeframe of the loss and the precice location. With those details, you can check historical newspapers and other records.
It often said that these types of lost train accounts are all tall tales made up in bars. I doubt that. It is most likely that they are essentially true, but the details got garbled in bars. The argument against the legends is that no railroad company would leave a valuable locomotive buried or submerged in water. But of course, they would leave it if the cost of recovery exceeded the value of the locomotive-- and that is often the case, not only with locomotives, but will other heavy equipment such as bulldozers.
If you can find strong circumstantial evidence for a lost locomotive, you can search directly at the site. If it is in a lake, you can perform a magetometer search while working on the surface when it is frozen.
It is important to realize that what you are looking for is an historical artifact as a physical piece of lost history, and not a free locomotive that you can restore to operation. The latter tends to be a railfan perception of the objective, and of course they all want to find 4-8-4s or Big Boys. And, since there are none of those, the fans tend to regard lost locomotive legends as being bogus.
Actually most lost locomotives tend to be small such as 0-4-0s lost in quirky mishaps such as construction accidents. But there are also mainline locomotives such as larger 4-4-0s that have been lost. If locomotives are lost submerged in water, they are typically also buried in the bottm. If they were sitting on a solid bottom like sand or rock, they likely would have been recovered. Bear in mind that some lost locomotive events occured on a rail line that was in a different location at the time of loss than it is now or has been in the modern era. Many lines were relocated from their original construction routes.
