The Quest for the Fabled Lost Locomotive
There were the three of us on that steamy summer evening, bug bitten, sweat soaked, caked in mud, seemingly defeated in our quest and yet determined to continue.
There was my dad, then in his 80’s, who thought he knew the location of the site deep in the swamp. There was my good friend Ron Simon, staff writer for the nearby Mansfield (Ohio) News Journal. There was Mike, a local archeologist. And there was yours truly, the instigator behind the entire business.
I had remarked over the years that beneath the veneer of calm and respectability of each and every Ward Cleaver, there lurks an Indiana Jones just rearing to get out and indulge in hair-raising adventures. I had done my best to prove it on numerous occasions. This was one of them.
In recent years, my headstrong insistence upon testing fate had caused me to be charged by an angry mother grizzly on a remote Montana trail, and to slog barefoot for an estimated 13 miles out of Florida’s Big Cypress Preserve after the tannic acid in the murky water dissolved the glue that held my running shoes together. For me, enough was never enough.
The object of our quest is best explained in the words of the local farmer’s wife when we stopped by to ask permission to park by a narrow lane leading into the muck and mire.
“You know there’s a lost locomotive back in there,” she informed us. And there it was. The lure of the mysterious. What could be more mysterious than a legendary lost locomotive? I had heard the rumors all my life. When my dad was a boy, he had trapped muskrats in that part of the swamp and thought he might be able to remember the exact site. The swamp was a strange place. Rumors of glowing lights crisscrossing the stagnant waters, of the phenomena known as foxfire, of an eyeless species of fish, had been repeated over the years.
I had speculated endlessly on the matter, consulted topographical maps of the area, poured over aerial photos of what might be the spot, written to famed author and undersea explorer Clive Cussler requesting his advice as to whether we might need sophisticated electronic gear in order to locate the wreck.
The reality is that the short-lived Lorain, Ashland and Southern Railroad was constructed in the years between 1911 and 1914. Its mission was to ship passengers and cargo between Lorain, Ohio up on Lake Erie and an obscure station named Custaloga in southern Ashland County, a spot named in honor of a Delaware Indian chief. The railroad was operational between 1914 and 1925. Its route was mostly over swamp land following the path of an underground river that bisects Ashland County, Ohio from the southeast, near the Funk Bottoms Wildlife Area, to the Savannah lakes to the northwest. It was nicknamed the rattlesnake road because, it was said, so many workmen were bitten by the poisonous serpents during construction. When it went broke as a result of poor rail conditions and corporate manipulations, the rails were eventually sold off for scrap.
The story is that one evening the locomotive carrying men and gear became stuck in the muck near the end of the day. It was decided to wait and extract it in the morning. But, when morning arrived, it was discovered that nothing was any longer visible but the smokestack. So, the path of the track was rerouted around the sinkhole. On an aerial map of the area, one can see where the track veered to the west.
I will say this, there could be no better place to lose a train than inside that swamp. The ground is so sodden that when one jumps on it, the entire earth shudders. Anything lost in that morass would remain lost forever.
As we began our quest, three or four boys of 12 or so decided to follow along on their Mopeds. As we tramped deeper into the mire and the ground became ever more unstable, they gave up and retreated. Only the ravenous mosquitoes and we were left.
The longer we persisted, the thicker and more entangled the vegetation grew, until we could barely take one step after another. Eventually, it became impenetrable. One hates to admit defeat, but we soon concluded that there was no way we were going to solve the mystery of the lost locomotive on that evening.
I speculated that entering the swamp from a different country road might be a better option. I had no takers.
Given that there had been no insurance claims filed concerning a sunken locomotive back around 1914, we knew that the whole thing was just a local legend, but there is something about lost trains, ghost trains, that appeals to the imagination, the sort of plot that made Cussler’s Night Probe such a successful seller.
Following the path of the old L.A. & S., one can still find railroad spikes among the reeds and underbrush. It is said that on the L.A. & S.’s final run from Lorain to Custaloga, the engineer blasted away on the whistle the entire trip. Does the eerie pealing of the whistle still echo hauntingly across the swamplands on dark nights?
Later, as we emerged bug bitten but unbowed from the swamp, I vowed, “This is not the end of this!”
Shortly thereafter, the historian William S. Snyder published The Rattlesnake and The Ramsey: The History of the Lorain, Ashland and Southern Railroad, affirming for once and for all that no locomotive was ever lost in that swamp. A huge sinkhole had appeared while the right of way was being carved through the swamp, but the crew altered their course and continued to the west on more stable ground.
That would have been the end of it until one afternoon a few weeks later when the phone rang. As I picked up, a voice at the other end said, “Hello, this is Clive Cussler.
My enthusiasms include fly fishing, natural history and wilderness backpacking. In 1996, I published privately a memoir, Trails of Laughter/ Trails of Tears, featuring my wilderness adventures and misadventures.I serve when needed as a Licensed Eucharistic Minister in the Episcopal Church.
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