Re: Railroad archeology

This talk of archaeology and rust reminds me of my foray into such. I'd just arrived to live at Kwajalein Atoll in 2002; biking to work one day, I passed an excavation site where they were planting drainage pipe. Laying on the edge of the hole was a very rusty narrow gauge wheelset. Workers were nowhere to be seen, so I and a cohort retrieved the step van and hauled the wheelset back to my 'house', as it were, where it sat by my front door for the duration. We were at our weight limit when we left, so I abandoned it in place.

Between 1900 and WWII, the Japanese occupied the atoll; among other things, they build a narrow gauge railway to haul ordnance and goods between the eastern islands of the atoll. This wheelset was a remnant of this operation. So, with my single artifact, I opened the Kwajalein Atoll Railway Museum, and started a Friends organization consisting of my self...