There are legacies of lost history of old train wrecks hiding just below the surface along old railroad grades throughout the country. Most artifacts have no intrinsic value other than what they speak about history. However, that alone can be uncanny, especially if they are really old. Sometimes items are lying on the surface today, but most will only be found by digging a little. A metal detector helps a lot, but there are a lot of hits on a rail bed, and many are of no consequence. One can get tired of digging holes that don’t yield much.
I have found the following items:
Several journal box lids. The earlier ones are cast iron, and the earliest one slides into a tapered fit with no hinges. It completely separates from the journal box when removed
Two locomotive-to-tender coupling links, which are much heavier pattern than the car coupler links. The two links are quite different in design. Both are pre-1900 era. Both are broken as if the pulled in two when loaded. That must have been exciting for the crew. One of them is apparently a forging, and is extremely hard. It rings when you drag your fingernails across it. The other one is a casting, and was somewhat embedded in a tree. The tree found it, picked it up, and presented it about a foot off the ground.
A unique rail spike with a triangular cross section to the shank. It is called a
Bayonet spike. For as common as spikes are along old roadbeds, there is always the possibility of finding one of a unique design. There were many different designs that never caught on and became widely used. I also found one with a four-sided point rather than the ubiquitous chisel point.
Several link & pin coupling pins. There is quite a bit of variations in the head design of such pins. One of mine is made by rolling wrought iron for the pin shank, and then it was stood into a square mold, and iron was poured around it to make a square head. There is a lot of draft taper on the four sides to get the pattern out of the mold sand.
I found a tortured fragment of the side opposite the knuckle of an early automatic coupler. This was right in the area where a head-on collision occurred in 1891. The fragment gave obvious evidence of being dislodged by severe compression into the coupler from the front. The small ribs on the outside were buckled from compression before the fragment broke off. I would like to think it was from that 1891 wreck, but that date seems almost too early for the use of automatic couplers. But I suppose locomotives would have been equipped right at the outset of the automatic coupler era with automatics having a slotted knuckle so they could handle either type of coupler on any rolling stock as the cars were gradually converted. Would 1891 have been too early for an automatic coupler on a locomotive?
