History -- Deep Sea Detectvies : Underwater Train Wreck Review

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(More customer reviews)This is my kind of mystery. Two locomotives sitting upright, essentially parallel to one another, under ninety feet of water five miles out from the coast of Long Branch, New Jersey - with no signs of any sort of shipwreck anywhere near that area. From the coral buildup, it's obvious that these are very old locomotives, but their origins are completely unknown. No one even knew they existed until a local charter boat captain chanced upon them (using a magnetometer) back in the mid-1980s. When a team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) marked them in 1989 during a search of the ocean floor for potential shipping dangers, they tentatively identified them as locomotives that were known to have sunk with the Arundo when it was torpedoed by a U-boat in 1942 - but they didn't really investigate the matter because their overriding mission was identifying potentially dangerous obstructions to the shipping lanes. In any event, it turns out that the locomotives that went down with the Arundo are still on the ship where it sank 14 miles away. The New Jersey Historical Diver's Association began investigating the locomotives' possible origins in 2002, but any information whatsoever on these mysterious ocean artifacts proved to be quite elusive. Essentially, no one knew that these two locomotives had ever existed.
This History Channel documentary takes us through the investigative process. The Deep Sea Detectives speak with the man who first found the locomotives, NOAA spokesmen, local divers, and members of the New Jersey Historical Diver's Association. With a few salvaged artifacts in hand, they seek out the wisdom of a railroad historian and, through him, begin to zero in on the story these long-silent locomotives have to tell. With divers serving as the historian's eyes, the window in time in which these locomotives must have been built is narrowed from a period of thirty years down to five, and that in turn helps focus the investigators' historical research for any news item related to the find. They are eventually able to determine, with some degree of confidence, where the locomotives shipped from and, after final dives searching the sand in and around the locomotives (as well as a thorough search for any type of identifying marker) settle their internal debate as to whether the locomotives were attached to a barge which sank or whether they must have fallen or been pushed over the side of a sailing vessel during high seas.
It is fascinating to see all the resources these folks bring to bear in their search. Along the way, we also get some insights into the early history of locomotives and life as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. Best of all, these coral-encrusted relics of the past turn out to be exceedingly rare finds of great significance to transportation and railroad history. You could hardly ask for a better example of maritime history's mysteries.

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