Hunting for Railroad Relics at an old rail road dump pile

[MrSchulz]

My friend and I went out Relic Hunting at a spot we've been surfing out the last month and finnally decided to make another hit. There are railroad tracks that are on a bridge crossing a creek, back about 1/2 mile in a public park through the woods on a beat up old trail. Not alot of people know about this place, we only found it looking at old maps, and went searching through google earth. We surfed it about two weeks ago, and found out it is an OLD dump Pile. We were finding intact Insulators some porcelain, some hand blown glass, and the common hemingray. Even better they were on the same poles that were dumped there, a long time ago. The oldest one we found, so far is a patent date of February 23rd, 1883. Well like I said, it was dumped partially on a creek, and when they tore the old bridge down in the turn of the century, they just left all the stuff in the creek some has flown down the river the past 80 years, but there are still some good stuff there. If you go around the corner it is where all the posts were thrown with the insulators. We were pulling insulators out of the ground intact, or with just a few small flea bites. We went into the water, with fast rapids, and about 10 yards downstream is where the best stuff started coming up. We were pulling out more in tact insulators, hand forged spikes, tons of railroad plates, and lots of other stuff.


Are the railroad plates worth anything other then scrap? There's probably 200 or so.

I know that this is probably not completely legal, and could be considered theft, but aren't we cleaning up the environment and preserving an American History, that is slowly going away? We plan to donate alot of the stuff to our local museum so everyone can see a dying piece of American History.


We plan to go back out later this week, since im out of school tomorrow for the summer.

 

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[Minrelica]

Although the place is hidden, I'm sure that other treasure hunters, dog walkers and Sunday strollers have also been there as well. I think the insulators are worth more than the platesq and even they may not amount to much, if anything. Some of that stuff would look cool in your home or would be fun to collect but I'm not sure it would really be museum pieces... Some may be good in a small history center if that's what you meant. Hand forged RR spikes?

Spikes can be heated up in a fire pit and hammered into cool looking knives. There's some cool YouTube vids on it.. Check em' out.

 

[ncsilverspider]

Let us know of any other rr relics that come up, like baggage tags or locks, etc. Great spot! Hunt every part you can! BTW, what railroad is it?