|
precise location. One
account speaks of coaches at the end of the wharf. We
can see standard gauge remains just past the end of the
filled mole near the
freight slip in the 1902 photos. Photography shows only
partial views.
What we can see is that the Terminal had been segregated
with standard
gauge to the north half of the Terminal and narrow gauge to
the south. The
southern extension of the wharf may be represented on
current navigation
charts as a mound at about the 10 foot depth contour.
On balance, the chances are good that some of the coach
metal parts will be
accessible, if they have survived. We should see metal
coach remains laid
out roughly where they were deposited during the fire. The
largest pieces
will be wheel and axle sets about thirty feet apart, with
truss rods, brake
cylinders and other artifacts in between, and couplers and
draft gear, brake
wheels and platform grab irons in the shorter intervals.
The remains may
extend up to 1000 feet from shore.
|
|
|
Proton magnetometer survey
Our visit with Navy unexploded
ordnance expert Joe Vann at Mare Island,
was most
informative. Joe and his colleagues spend a great deal of their
time finding
buried metal. Using a device called a proton magnetometer,
the site can
be scanned and a map generated showing the location and
mass of
metallic objects down to a fairly small size. The scan and analysis
would
takea week of work by a team of
three at a cost of about $8,000.
Actual
recovery would require divers and some support equipment.
Recording the
locations of exhumed artifacts on a site grid will be essential
to
interpretation. It is the evolution of narrow gauge coach design during
the formative
period of 1876 to 1887 that we are interested in, and, as
Randy Hees
reported in Issue #3 of this newsletter, we have enough
information
to precisely identify the coaches if we know which artifacts are
physically
associated with the remains of a particular coach.
|
|
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
