One of the features of this cache is the initial placement of several date nails into the cache.
WHAT IS A DATE NAIL?
Briefly, a date nail is a nail with the date stamped in its head. For example, a nail with a "12" is from 1912. They are usually 2 1/2" long, with 1/4" shanks. Date nails were driven into railroad ties, bridge timbers, utility poles, mine props and other wooden structures for record keeping purposes. Most date nails are steel, though many are copper, aluminum, malleable iron or brass. The nail heads can be round, square, diamond, pentagon as well as other more rare shapes. There are over 2,000 different date nails used by North American railroads that show the year.
BRIEF HISTORY OF DATE NAILS
Western Europe suffered a timber shortage much earlier than North America, which is why railroads in France, England and Germany were chemically treating ties long before companies here. Date nails were in use in France by 1870. Wherever treated ties come into use, date nails are not far behind. Railroads need a way to monitor their investment in treating, and date nails became the most common method of this record keeping. When North American railroads began to use treated ties in large numbers at the end of the 1800's, it was not known which chemicals, treatment methods or woods were most economical. They needed some method of keeping track of the lives of ties, so like their European counterparts they decided to mark them. By the late 1800's American railroads settled on the use of date nails. The oldest known North American date nail is a 97 from the Mississippi River & Bonne Terre. It was in 1899 that major railroads began using nails to date ties with nails: that year the Chicago & Eastern Illinois, the Great Northern, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie began nail use. Others soon followed.
By the 1920's nail use was the norm. It peaked in the early 1930's with over a hundred different railroads using date nails in 1931. The depression, then World War II adversely affected nail use, and from 1950 to 1970 the number of railroads using date nails steadily declined so that for the past thirty years virtually no railroad has used them. The newest date nail in a tie in North America is an aluminum 94 found in CSX track in Virginia. The decline of the use of date nails can be attributed mainly to two things: the perfection of treatment techniques, and to the reliance of stamps in the ends of the ties for records.
Beat em Bucs!
Another feature of this cache were several Pittsburgh Pirate minature batting helments when it was first hidden on Christmas of 2015. The Pirates were a force to be reckoned with in the National League when I was growing up. Roberto Clemente (The Great One) and Willie Stargell (Pops; an earlier version of Big Papi) roamed the outfield, regulary hit balls out of the park, and brought home their share of World Series titles.