On June 9th, 1910, the CPR 694 freight train derailed after hitting a boulder on the track near Mink Harbor, Canada. It fell into Lake Superior and wasn’t seen again. Until now.
Last month, and over 100 years after the crash happened, a Minnesota-based underwater recovery expert named Tom Crossmon found the train on the bottom of the lake, reports Canadian outlet CBC News. He and his team are the first people to lay eyes on the train since it was lost.
After hitting the boulder, the train fell about 65 feet into the lake, and then sank another nearly 200 feet to the bottom. Three were killed, and one body was never found.
Here’s a video of the team’s first effort to capture some footage of the wreck. It’s very eerie-looking.
Crossmon said that, in tracking down the train’s location, they had no luck with sonar, but they used a remotely operated vehicle with a video camera and found the wreck that way:
Crossmon said they were able to pinpoint where the locomotive was resting with the help of information provided by a London, Ont., diver named Terry Irvine.
Irvine located two of the train’s boxcars in 2014 and gave Crossmon the GPS co-ordinates to that initial find.
Crossmon said the locomotive was found close by, tucked into some boulders.
The train is “too damaged to be raised,” but if the government gives its permission, some items on it can be brought back to us surface dwellers.
The train basically met the same fate as the Titanic, except it hit a boulder, not an iceberg. And it didn’t get a movie deal from James Cameron, either.
Yet.