Pre-war Barn Find

Even mangled up pieces of stainless and chromed sidetrim, window trim, etc can be made to look like new.
A guy in TX who is now out of the antique motorcycle business whom I dealt with used to kill time at the counter now and then by repairing old Harley trim pieces.

He would use tiny jewelers hammers, fine emery cloth, and polish; spending many hours delicately tapping out and refurbishing old, and often valuable, pieces of stainless trim.
Once completed one would swear the part was new original stock; even the pieces with designs and raised letters.
I never had the time to do that so most of my trim pieces are dinged a little but they look acceptable so all is good.

The extent of my endeavors in this kind of thing is tapping out some silver rings for family members as an evening hobby while watching Monday Night Football or whatever. These were made out of very old pre-copper half and silver dollars and sent out, after fitting them with a brake cylinder hone, to a local engraver who has the machine to do tiny cursive script.

Yep, in the woods where I hunted as a kid there was an old truck (30’s vintage I think) that we used to use as target practice along with everyone else. I’m sorry now, but it was far from restorable at the time.

Bing, you have lots of company. You’d be hard-pressed to find an old car in a rural field without some bullet holes. Roadsigns often fall victim too.

It was common around here many decades ago to line sections of some of the riverbanks with old cars; especially the one with sandy river bottoms and banks which were prone to washing out with flash floods.

Slightly OT, but about 40 or so miles south of me there is an old steam locomotive buried 30 feet down in the sand underneath the river due to a bridge collapse way back in the early 1900s. Almost every one of the slightly over 100 people on the train died and the story goes there was a gold shipment on board.
There has been offers to excavate it but the railroad has declined due to the possibility of disturbing the soft sand river bottom and possibly bringing down the existing RR bridge along with the 4 lane auto bridge close to it.

Soft sand (quick sand?), sunken train, with tales of death and lost gold…what a combination.

At the time the river was flooding and the bridge was washed out. The train went in about 5 in the morning and cars were swept away except for the locomotive which was too heavy and sank on the spot. It continued to sink over the years and is roughly 30 feet underneath the water now…
The terrain there is very flat and sandy anyway and a large concrete company has had operations there for as long as I can remember excavating sand for their cement operations.

I don’t think they ever recovered all of the bodies.

http://m.newsok.com/floods-similar-to-1906-storm-that-sank-train/article/2431504

By any chance are you referring to the 1906 bridge derailment detailed in the 1993 newspaper story in the above link?

That’s it and reads differently from the original story I perused a long time ago. The story I read was written shortly after the crash so maybe the journalists were a little gung-ho on the facts by reporting the loss of life as heavier.

There was a followup story in the local paper here about 10 years ago with someone wanting to go and salvage the train but were turned down. It was also reported that the train is a lot further down than 9 feet.

All the tornado weather in recent days makes me think of video I have seen that was a security video on the back of a locomotive which captured footage of a tornado hitting a freight train and easily toppling fully loaded coal cars, derailing the entire train. I have also seen multiple videos of entire semi trucks amazingly high in the air caught in the vortex of a tornado. One of the most dangerous places to be in a tornado is in a car!

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nVQz9y_qKYI.

Correction: It wasn’t coal cars in the tornado versus train video. I confused that with another incident. Anyway, hete is the video I saw in a SKYWARN class. Then picture being in a car against a tornado!

Train wrecks were sadly all too common in the good old days. Steamboat explosions, too. We have it so easy now.

What do you think the odds were of making it to the West Coast from Pa in the covered wagon days?

@Marnet - yikes, what a crash. That’s one of the few real-time train derailments I’ve seen. Worst part was the tanker car at the end, at least it didn’t burst and cause a fire.

@“oldtimer 11” I have wondered just what the percentage was of those who successfully made it all the way west in wagon days. If I rememer correctly, the last wagon on the Oregon trail was sometime around WWI or a few years later. On a pair of driving trips through western states I took my mom on years ago, we saw remnants of the old trails where thousands of wagon wheels had cut deeply into the ground and rock. Of course, the vast majority of the old wagon trails are long obliterated by modern development including modern roads which have routed right along the old wagon trails. One drives from point A to point B in a day on a route that took wagons weeks to negotiate.

@texases. Yes, the terrifying part is seeing that tanker car still coming with wheels shooting sparks, plowing into other railcars and more from behind it piling up. Quite a visual lesson in the practical application of physics.

Quoting @Oldtimer_11

“What do you think the odds were of making it to the West Coast from Pa in the covered wagon days?”
If we are to believe the old Ward Bond Wagon Train series, the odds weren’t good. However some 400,000 people traveled the Oregon trail, including at least a pair of my ancestors. Do you have a number?

I won’t go into the entire story but I’ve related one before about getting caught in a tornado about 8 o’clock one night in a nasty storm. There’s been times when I’ve been in some dicey situations (a looming motorcycle crash, etc) and was antsy but the tornado incident is the only time in my entire life that I can say that I was scared to death.
The fact that I was about to buy the farm was not scaring me; it was the dying and not knowing why because I had no idea what was going on; only something was not quite right.

That fear really soaked in when the Ford pickup went backwards for a bit, raised up in the air, floated for a few seconds, and turned 90 degrees before slamming back to rest crossways in the road. That was followed by half the glass blowing in on me with a loud bang, throwing me over the steering wheel, and then sucking everything piled on the front seat back out the opening where the rear glass formerly was.

Discovered later it was an F2 about a 100 or so yards wide and had been on the ground for about 8 miles before entering town. It did quite a bit of damage in the little town I was passing through and injured half a dozen people including a tanker truck driver whose rig was flipped over into a ditch. I never claimed any injuries as they were minor bruises and a number of tiny cuts from the exploding glass; mostly on the arms and back of the neck.

They had an F2 hit a tiny town in South Dakota Sunday morning. There was one story where the guy was in his basement and he was being sucked out. Hit a wall and got knocked out and woke up with a bunch of debris on him. Figures thats what saved him from either getting sucked right out of his basement or clobbered by the flying debris. Took most of the 100 year church out too with kids in Sunday School at the time. I don’t think anyone was killed though. They have basements. Nothing to fool around with. My sister was in the one in Fridley, MN in '65 but didn’t get much damage. I judge the fear factor when you are shaking so hard you can’t get the cigarette lit.