I would have to admit that after three years of exploring the Copper Country there isn’t too much that surprises me anymore. Hoist foundation? Check. Boiler Stack foundation? Check. Rock House foundation? Check. The list is the same each time, almost no matter where I go. But then there are those times that arrive during our explorations that remind me of why I do what I do. These are moments where I am genuinely surprised by what I find, and for a moment I feel like an explorer of old that has laid his eyes on a long lost treasure that hadn’t been seen by human eyes for centuries. This was the case at Quincy when we stumbled across a long line of rock cars that had been abandoned along the wye connecting the Q&TL up with the Mineral Range. Amazing.

What made this discovery so unique (and lets face it I’ve covered cars like these plenty of times before) was just how relatively intact they were. While far from being in mint condition, these cars did have the distinction of being unscathed by graffiti or damaged by fire. It looked as if the engine simply returned from the mill, uncoupled its long line of rock cars, and steamed off for good. Since then they have been untouched by man – preserving details that we hadn’t seen before.

First up, couplers. While we had found cars sitting in a line as if they were once coupled together, we had never found the coupling devices themselves to be still attached. Here is what they looked like, although they no longer are coupled anymore. Supposedly Quincy added automatic couplers to these cars, but nothing about this coupler looks automatic. It even looks like a metal pin was used to lock them together (seen in the upper part of the image).

Also relatively intact where the door controls. While the wheel was gone, the gearing and locking latch was still present. This one looks to have been preserved with the help of the tree which had graciously formed around the mechanism to protect it.

One of the more amazing elements of this find were the trees themselves. Its amazing what a tree will do in order to reach the sky. As the rock cars sat here over the last half century, the forest simply grew up around and through them. If something got in their way – like this rod – the tree simply grew around it. Given another half century and the tree will have swallowed the rod hole – encasing it inside its trunk.

While the wooden inside of these cars had rotted away thanks to the heavy snows of winter, a great deal of their steel undercarriage remained. Something that we hadn’t seen before were the chains used to hold the discharge chutes closed. Well here they are. You can see them come up from the doors off frame to the right (which are in a closed position) and winding around a steel rod. The rod was connected to those chute controls on the side of the car.

To open the doors the ratchet was thrown on the controls which allowed the weight of the rock to push the doors down and out – pulling the chain and spinning the rod. To close them again an operator would wind the chain back around the rod – pulling the doors closed.

Another great find was the air brake mechanism – which aren’t original to the cars. These cars originally used manual brakes originally, that required an operator to physically apply the brakes on each individual car. Quincy later retrofitted the cars with an air brake system. Air Brakes allowed every car attached together to have its brakes applied at the same time by a flip of a switch.

Air brakes use pressurized air to push upon a brake cylinder, which in turn applies brake shoes to the wheels. For this to work each car had to carry a small tank in which the pressurized air was stored, ready for use. I believe that the photo above is of that tank – still attached to the rock car’s side. At its front is a valve assembly that I believe is called a “triple valve” – which is what actually applied the brakes when needed.

An air brake system works in a “charged” state, meaning the entire system had to be pressurized. When the engineer wanted to apply the brakes, he pulled a lever which released pressure (air) out of the system. The triple valve would detect that change in pressure, and purge the air tank by the same amount. The air purged from the tank would then be sent to out to the brake cylinder to apply the brakes.

Sitting behind the air tank – and connected to it by a pipe – is this contraption. I had at first thought this was the brake cylinder, but now I’m not sure. It certainly looks like a brake cylinder, but in order for it to be one it would mean that the brake pads themselves were applied hydraulically since this thing is too far away from the wheels. This doesn’t seem right since I was under the impression that brake shoes were applied directly by means of the piston in the cylinder. I just don’t know.

Another possibility is that this is a second air tank – something known as an emergency reservoir. As originally designed, early air brakes could only supply about half of the pressure in the storage tank to the brake cylinder – for some fluid dynamic reasons I can’t recall from college. So even if the engineer wanted the brakes to be applied hard and released all the pressure out of the system, only have of that pressure would be transferred to the brakes. This second emergency tank was added to give an extra “boost” of pressure to the brakes. But it only could be used once before being recharged. I’m not sure, however, what air brake system Quincy added to these cars. So I don’t know if this would be an emergency tank or not.

Hopefully someone else out there (hint hint) can fill in some blanks…