Strategic Steam Reserve

carlos2010 · Joined: 23 Oct 2010 Posts: 288

Not sure if this has been approached before, a pretty strong urban legend among the urbex community.

As Diesel/Diesel Electric trains were coming into service and steam were phased out, theres rumour that all over the country are secret underground sites that house steam loco's, lying dormant for nigh on 60 years but ready to roll if there called upon.

Ive found at least one tale of a steam driver and fireman who were taking a train of loco's to meet the gas axe and go to the station in the sky, however they were stopped at a signal box and relieved of duty with full pay, the train went to an unknown destination never to be seen.

There are suspected sites that have been listed as favourites, however the lack of track from them to a main line would not cause a problem, a segment of the army (REME or such), would find no difficulty in laying track to a mainline in the minimum amount of time.

So whay are these "beasts" sleeping? The main theory is in case of an EMP blast which would render anything electrical, 99% of items we own, useless, from wrist watches to power stations. If such a thing happened, how would you get troops from one end of the country to the other? Good old steam seems to be a fairly decent back up.

Do we think its feesable for such places to exist? If such a place was found, it would be the "holy grail" among the urbex community and steam lovers alike.

Any thoughts, comments?

bitterbuck1 · Posted: Tue Dec 20, 2011 12:41 pm Post subject:

That never crossed my mind.
Does make sense though if they did have them 'stashed' somewhere for
an emergency use.

While we were on holiday we had something similar happen.
We went to fuel up the rental car and the station
would not accept credit cards. So we went to 2 other stations with
the same results.

At the last station the manager said that all the Islands had lost the fiberoptic and no credit card transactions could be completed.
So we paid cash and off to the airport.

There at the airport we had the same problem, their computers were also
down. Instead of swiping your I.D. or punching in your itinerary # the
folks at the counter had to check each persons I.D. manually and then
write out a boarding pass.

It took quite awhile to get onto the plane but then we sat for 2 hours waiting for the pilot to get his flight plan.

It was quite the adventure. Amazing how we take some things for
granite. Very Happy