Quicksand Fans

This is a book by novelist Clive Cussler. It tells of his real life adventures hunting ship wrecks ( although this story is about a missing train). The chapter "The lost locomotive of Kiowa Creek" is about a train in 1878 that plunged off a washed out bridge and sank & disappeared in quicksand. He later used some of the ideas of this in his book "Night Probe"

The possibility that the engine was simply recovered, renumbered, and put back into service is probably the best explanation, however, there is one possibility that I notice was not considered, that the engine's boiler exploded upon contact with the water. Not a high probability but that would have disassembled the locomotive and distributed the parts over a much larger area than would be expected. The drive wheels would be the main identifiable objects that would survive.

For a well witnessed example what exploding boilers could do, note the distance the debris was thrown when the KATY railroad deliberately crashed two locomotives together at high speed in 1896 in Crush, Texas for the amusement of tens of thousands of spectators, several of whom where killed by the unexpectedly large blast radius. Note also that locomotives washed off of bridges in floods have a way of disappearing as there was a similar incident over Village Creek in Arlington, Texas in 1885 and all trace of the locomotive has been lost. Again, there is the same set of theories, the engine is still buried there and just hasn't been found by all the folks with metal detectors yet, or, it was recovered by the railroad at a later date as scrap nobody bothered to think worthy of recording the disposition of.

In both cases I have to wonder if any of the searchers factored in the possibility of a boiler explosion reducing the size of the debris to nothing larger than a drive wheel and the much greater distance a smaller object like that could have been tossed by the explosion.

Learn something new every day.

Thanks for the history lesson, guys.