This Train Disappeared Into The Ground — To This Day, It Has Never Been Found

In the show Lost, a plane, Oceanic Flight 815, disappears and no one in the world knows where it landed. In the show, we see that the plane crash-landed on a mysterious island and the survivors live and try to make their new lives on the island.

Of course, in real life, we tend not to know what happens to mysterious airplanes that disappear, including Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

However, one inspiration for the show was the mysterious disappearance of a Locomotive 115 train that has, to this day, never been found.

It was the Lindal train disaster in 1892 (near the town of Lindal-in-Furness), where a train in England disappeared into a hole in the ground and was never recovered.

The crash of the plane in Lost happened on September 22, 2004. Locomotive 115 sank in a hole on September 22, 1892. The numbers 815 and 115 are also eerily similar, and the numbers of both events are similar enough not to be a coincidence.

This is the story of the disappeared train that inspired Lost.

What happened to the railroad driver?

In a September 30, 1892 article in The Engineer, a news story reported on the disappearance of a cargo train on Lindal Railway.

The driver started noticing the ground giving way underneath him (cracks in the ground), and since the engine was traveling slowly, the driver was able to shut off steam, reverse the train, and jump off the train just as it plunged into a hole.

The railroad driver’s name was Thomas Postlethwaite, and he had to go to the hospital after the fall. He crashed against a wagon, but he narrowly escaped the train just as it dived into the ground, according to a September 24, 1892 article in the Lancaster Gazette.

With his narrow escape, there were no casualties in the train disappearance.

What happened to the train?

The Engineer account says the cause of the hole was a “subsidence of the embankment,” which is the natural downward movement on the Earth’s surface or sinking into the ground.

A rescue staff in the area started trying to recover the train. But the ground sank even more when the team tried to recover it. Both the width and height of the hole increased, occupying eight lines of rail in width.

This cut off rail traffic across the whole Lindal Railway, forcing passengers to have to walk across the railraod, around the hole.

According to a 1901 copy of The Railway Magazine, the coal tender of the train was recovered, but the 35 ton engine was not. While the railroad staff was taking a break around 2:30 p.m. to get more lifting gear, the hole sunk even deeper from 30 feet to about 60 feet, carrying the engine with it. It kept sinking until the engine could no longer be found.

The cause of the disappearance

The ground had been on unsteady foundation for a long time. All trains started slowing before crossing a bridge in the area due to the “shaky nature of the ground,” according to The Engineer. Railroad workers started reinforcing the security of the shaky railroad line with wood for some time.

But what caused the sinking into the ground?

The Engineer’s account hypothesized two explanations for the shaky ground. First, it thought mining activity from the Parkside and Lindal Moor Mining Company changed the steadiness of the ground.

However, the account also said the Parkside mines “have not been interfered with by the subsidence in the embankment,” which means the massive hole in the ground in no way affected the nearby mine. This account then advanced a theory that water pumped from the mine led to percolation through the rock and left cavities in the upper strata.

But there was another theory advanced by The Engineer: the Earth in that area was just the result of the collapse of a soft area in the ground where an underground stream existed.

Fortunately, no one died. But the event had a long-lasting legacy.

The hole took 300 wagon loads of material to make the railroad able to run again.

One rumor circulated regarding the train having passengers. This led to people walking around the massive hole in the ground coming to look, but the misconception was quickly dispelled by authorities.

David Brandon and Alan Brooke, authors of Shadows in the Steam,say the Lindal Railway would not be operating like normal until spring of 1893. Mining in the area, however, continued, and miners often joked about the “new safety hazard” of steam locomotive trains falling through the roof.

Some urban legends say the №115 is still running underground, and many in the area joke about recovering the train.

The Sherlocks Holmes story, The Story of the Lost Special, published in 1898, revolves around a disappearing train driving from Liverpool to London. No one finds any track of the train, and eight years after the train disappears, someone confesses to the disappearance.

In all likelihood, the train sank beyond sight and then railroad workers had to fill the hole with ballast.

But to this day, no one knows where Locomotive 115 ended up. One day in the distant future, someone might discover it.