Trains found underwater off of NJ coast

46er

46er

Piney
Mar 24, 2004
8,837
2,144
Coastal NJ
A nice write up about the 2 inshore locomotives by the NJ Museum of Transportation.

http://www.njmt.org/images/SunkenLocoInfoArticles.pdf

Dogg, if you have interest, there is an excellent book that covers 350 years of wrecks titled 'New Jersey Shipwrecks' from Down the Shore Publishers. Should be available at libraries. It gives the reason the ocean off NJ is referred to as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Google Earth also has a pretty good layer that shows many of the wrecks and my old fishing charts show many not recorded. For me it's a facinating subject as my Father and his Father worked on the sea.
 
manumuskin

manumuskin

Piney
Jul 20, 2003
8,686
2,609
60
millville nj
www.youtube.com
the video claims it was not a barge since no remains of it were found metal detecting around the wreck.Do you have other info showing they were wrong? A barge makes sense to me since I can't see them being placed exactly side by side facing the same direction and upright if they fell off a ship but they claim lack of metal detecting findings means no barge. I thought barges were used only in rivers,never would have thought they would use barges in the open ocean,seems very unsafe in rough seas. I'd like to see them raised.If they brought them up and cleaned them off I think they'd find the ID they have been looking for under the barnacles either on a tag or inscribed right into the steel.
 
46er

46er

Piney
Mar 24, 2004
8,837
2,144
Coastal NJ
manumuskin said:
I thought barges were used only in rivers,never would have thought they would use barges in the open ocean,seems very unsafe in rough seas. I'd like to see them raised.If they brought them up and cleaned them off I think they'd find the ID they have been looking for under the barnacles either on a tag or inscribed right into the steel.
Click to expand...

Barges have been, and still are used, in the coastal ocean, with some very large ones used in open ocean. It's how a lot of fuel oil gets shipped and what my father and grandfather worked on for a time. They can still be seen from the beach as they pass along the coast. In times past NY harbor had many, many car barges, as they are called, to get train cars between NJ and NY. They were still in heavy use when I worked in NY, their dock was right next to the ferry terminal in Jersey City where my train ended. It is now Liberty State Park.

The trains have been identified as Planet Class 2-2-2's; see the link in my last post.
 
Teegate

Teegate

Administrator
Site Administrator
Sep 17, 2002
26,009
8,775
How many have watched the complete video? The video disagrees with the opinions of a few members here.

Guy
 
RednekF350

RednekF350

Piney
Feb 20, 2004
5,075
3,371
Pestletown, N.J.
46er said:
Unless this is a new discovery and not the subway cars, its got to be either the 2 engines that were on the Arundo when it was torpedoed in WWII, or the 2 engines the dive captain found in the mid 80's fairly close to shore. They are both pretty old news :smug:
Click to expand...

The detailed description of the Arundo wreck in this account on NJ Scuba mentions the locomotives in the picture description.
http://njscuba.net/sites/site_mud_hole.html

I use NJ Scuba quite a bit for interesting accounts and pictures of what's down there with respect to the wrecks off CM for my fishing exploits.
Too bad the owner of the site is very tight lipped on exact locations. I use every available source for wreck fishing and the published information is very often innacurate.
 
46er

46er

Piney
Mar 24, 2004
8,837
2,144
Coastal NJ
RednekF350 said:
I use every available source for wreck fishing and the published information is very often innacurate.
Click to expand...

I made my first BFT trip in my own boat to the Arundo in the late 70's, a Chris Craft dory. Got skunked and had a very cold, wet ride home. Much of the inaccuracy of the locations on the old charts I have were done on purpose, the owners were very tight lipped and wanted it that way and had a standard for finding the true location. I found a program to convert the Loran C numbers to GPS, but without the standard, the charts are just nice wall decoration.

Here is another pretty good site for wrecks.

http://www.aquaexplorers.com/shipwrecks.htm
 
RednekF350

RednekF350

Piney
Feb 20, 2004
5,075
3,371
Pestletown, N.J.
My best numbers are ones that have been given to me by someone who has marked a wreck and fished it.

The State's numbers for individual wrecks within the artificial reef sites are usullally pretty good.
I think some of the problems with store bought charts like Home Port is that the current lat/lon numbers on their charts were likely converted from their original library of Loran C numbers using conversion programs. Without a field check of the converted numbers they are a crapshoot.
 
ecampbell

ecampbell

Piney
Jan 2, 2003
2,895
1,037
I too watched all of it even though I had seen it before and it is a very old video, Jeff! :dance:

It was quite interesting.
 
MarkBNJ

MarkBNJ

Piney
Jun 17, 2007
1,875
73
Long Valley, NJ
www.markbetz.net
I tried to watch it, but it keeps timing out trying to buffer. And I'm a Comcast subscriber. Netflix streaming eats their lunch. But anyway, two things Al mentioned... sand on the bottom is pretty silty and the top layers are water saturated. Stirs up very easily, but if you press down into it you don't sink that far. And yeah, there is lots of coastal barge traffic. I worked two summers on a tug that pushed barley, oil, corn, and fertilizer up and down the east coast. Spent many a night waiting off AC, pitching and rolling, for some late NYC boat to come down and take our barges north. It's like a maritime highway out there.
 
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