… they flooded an entire railroad yard. It is now being raised and salvaged. I wonder if that locomotive will ever steam again?
I like the weathering.(http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-cool.gif)
If they do restore it, I wonder if they will paint it gray, or Pennsy green.
That is just so cool.
Looks to me to be a 0-6-0T. I wonder what the gage is?
I am finding references to it being 5 foot gauge.
Wikipedia says “Except for dedicated railroad sections, such as the concrete factory, the broad 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge was used. This gauge was also used for the locomotives along the locks (“mules”). When the gauge for the railroad was changed in 2001, the mules kept the broad gauge.”
It does have a nice patina.
Amazing condition considering the time those pieces spent under water.
If the water is deep enough, and cold enough, the iron wont oxidize (rust) very quickly.
David Maynard said:
If the water is deep enough, and cold enough, the iron wont oxidize (rust) very quickly.
The article said the yard was in 35 ft of water, and it was in the Isthmus of Panama, so I doubt it was neither very deep, nor cool.
I was on a oceanographic research mission a long time ago, one of the vessels was from Oregon or Washington, and we went down to Peru.
At Panama, the water temp got up to 80 degrees and heated the hull so much it overwhelmed the AC system in the boat.
Not too many cool places in Panama.
Greg
So I was wrong about the coolness of the water. But what really determines how fast iron and steel will rust is the oxygen content in the water. That was the point I was trying to make. The more free oxygen in the water, the faster those metals will rust. That is why metal at the surface of a body of water rusts away pretty quickly, it gets wet, then exposed to air, and that cycle repeats. Stuff that is completely submerged will not rust away as fast. But its amazing to think that that railroad equipment was submerged for 100 years, and its hasn’t degraded to the point where it just fell apart when exposed to the air.
Well, it was covered in algae, that might have had something to do with preserving the metal.