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[quote user="R. T. POTEET"][quote user="inch53"] [quote user="Eriediamond"]Good grief, thats going to be one deep lake!!!!![/quote]A little story, theres a steam engine in the Wabash river below the old NYC bridge in Terre Haute, IN. which they dump over the side during the hundred year flood back in the 20's or 30's, to keep the bridge from washing out. The story goes they were going to get it out when the river went down but couldn't, to full of mud, so they left it. When the river gets real low you can still see it from the bridge, with permision of course. So it doesn't have to be deep water, just not wourth the effort to do it.Oh, it save the bridge and it's still used today by CSX[/quote] I have my own little locomotive-in-the-water windy to spin. I don't know for sure just where I read this but I believe that it came from the pages of [i]Trains[/i] magazine. It seems that somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century the CRI&P dumped an American Standard type steam locomotive off of the Cimarron River bridge in Central Oklahoma.  This particular locomotive had, as I remember the story, been manufactured in the early 1870s and the Rock Island did not deem it to be of enough value to warrant the salvage cost; the locomotive was, consequently, abandoned at location.  Eventually it became completely covered over with river sand and forgotten. Sometime in the '70s or '80s, I guess, a reporter wrote a short article in an Oklahoma newspaper about this incident; the article revealed that this locomtive was still there somewhere on the downstream side of the bridge.  This revelation piqued the interest of a group of Rock Island railfans who immediately conjured up a scheme to get this century old American Standard out of the river and, hopefully, return it to (excursion) service.  They hired an outfit to sonar the site and the wreck was soon identified there in the riverbed; it had drifted a little way downstream but was, in essence, exactly where it had lay for seven decades. Enter the Army Corps of Engineers at this point; they are the arbiter of navigable waterways which the Cimarron River is deemed to be at this location.  They promptly put the kibosh on this whole thing; the locomotive had been there in the riverbed for so long that it had, by their definition, become, part and parcel, a virtual part of the riverbed.  They denied their permission for the locomotive to be removed; to do so posed an imminent danger to the structural integrity of the bridge. It is, I reckon, there to this day.  I do not pretend to understand the Army Corp of Engineer's reasoning in this matter; I have only related the story as I remember it!    [/quote] Downstream is probably more of a problem for a bridge that upstream at least from a Hydrologist point of view.
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