Urban Legends .

As usual ,I am avoiding work on a Big Boy painting .Actually I am waiting for some paint to dry(yeah,right). Knoob and I whiled away some cab time discussing lost engines ,etc. Knoob's information was excellent and ,like me,Earl was a skeptic abot lost engine tales . One of my favorites is the "locomotive buried in a tunnel" tale . I have heard a number of variations on this one.Once I heard a cab-forward was buried in the Sierras . The guy who told this tall tale was wisely asked by the owner of the hobby shop to hit the bricks . Now Steele Man says an L-131 is hiding in the tunnel on Tennessee Pass . I heard that one too.(Hey,Rick ,I will provide the spade and pick .I will sit on the pickup bed ,guarding the beer and sandwiches) Another was a bunch of steam locomotives were sent to Korea from the U.S. and stored in a tunnel. Also I was once told that a bunch of C-16s were sent to India during WWII . The one true tale is that at least a couple of ships torpedoed by U-boats on the North Atlantic were loaded with "G.I." 2-8-0s and 2-8-2s Brand-new Baldwins and ALCOs sit at some great depth below the cold waters of the Atlantic .
I find it highly unlikely that a major railroad would plug a tunnel with an engine that was worth thousands of dollars in scrap . However ,as ncng9 points out ,dozens of locomotives exist in isolated places all over North America ,if not the world . Isolation is the key ,as moving or scrapping such engines was not economical . Chances are good that the engines are small . For the most part ,little bits and pieces of our rail heritage exist in car bodies ,tenders ,etc. scattered about . B.S.artists will tell any tale to get a rise out of the listener . Some of the b.s. comes from respected modellers , etc .Once a railroad official told me the "Bondad" sign was still down at the siding site,in the weeds .I later found out he took the sign himself home shortly after abandonment of the Farmington branch. What motivation he had in telling this lie to me still mystifys me . The trick is to separate the wheat and the chaff . The truth is out there . Have I told a tale or two ? Once ,in 1976 , a railfan from California asked me when was the railraod going to tear down the coal tipple .Sick of the many negative and "loaded" questions that we received at the time I replied,"We plan to tear it down after we scrap the #483" .He simply walked away with the fraudulent information !