A brand new puzzle has turned up. It's almost charming.
I've been scanning newspaper archives online. The best source has been the Chicago Trib. They followed the story closely, and they carried the graphic (morning after the crash) showing the rotation and erroneous backward slide.
On Tuesday they reported that one engine was found buried eight feet deep in mud and one other engine had been located, with two still missing. On Wednesday they reported that all had been found, with three of them (2, 3 and 4) 'close together' on open ground. It seems very odd that they could find one of those three on the day after the crash, and it took another day to see two more that were close to it. Since their frame of reference was that these were about 30 feet from the forward fuselage, we may take 'close' to mean something on that order of magnitude, as opposed to (say) a hundred feet apart.
This was open ground with no other wreckage in the area except the forward fuselage. In my document I pointed out two objects in photographs which were candidates to be engines, in the area the Chicago Trib described. An Electra engine is about 12 feet long and 29 inches high lying on its side. If you think of a Jaguar F-type, you're not far off. There were (per the Trib) three of these within about three car-lengths of each other, but they couldn't find two of those for a day.
Further, the one buried in mud was said to be number one. There is a distinct line in the aerial views where something went zooming off to the southwest from near the tracks, which I strongly suspect but can't prove was an engine. But if this was engine one, then it separated before the left wing or nose touched the ground. This seems as unlikely as not seeing two engines lying on the ground within a dozen yards or so.
This was not the CAB report; this was the Trib reporter relating what he thought the CAB rep said. I'm familiar with terrible reporting, and this sounds like something was garbled in the communication. These two Trib stories, taken together, are invalid on their face. I suspect two engines on open ground near the forward fuselage were just as I described in my document - engines one and two, which separated just east of their final location.
The irreducible core of this report is that the CAB said they could not account for the full complement of engines until Tuesday, and on Monday they were puzzled by this.
This is not something a reporter is just going to make up; it had to have come from the CAB. So why was there difficulty accounting for all of them? As in several other pieces of this documentation, the question is how much we have to discard before the rest makes sense.
Nothing was moved from the crash scene under official auspices until Wednesday at the earliest, when mapping was done. The Bridgeport Post reported on Monday that the rail line was out of service 'for a time', so the track was reopened to traffic on the day of the crash. The question is then to ponder what might have put it out of service.
The track was clearly shifted about a foot, but the distortion is over about 40 feet, and is within the range of normal distortion for poorly maintained track. The railroad could have simply stopped rail traffic while the site was surveyed for damage. There may have been some broken ties that either needed replacing or at least needed review before they allowed rail traffic to resume. There may have been some sheet metal and other wing material on the track, which could have been moved by several people lifting it off. Or it might have been engine four.
I have said that it looks like engine four was left lying on the railroad tracks. Two pictures show an object on the rails that looks to be the right size, with a couple people standing near it.
The railroad would have been the ones to move engine four off the tracks, if that really was engine four in the pictures. They had the rail-mounted equipment and know-how to pick it up and hand it off to the CAB at a convenient intersection perhaps.
I'm intrigued by the possibility that they did this without coordinating with the CAB, thus resulting in a missing engine until it was located sitting on a flatcar. It seems more likely that they did get some kind of ok from a CAB investigator at the tracks, and then this wasn't communicated to the CAB site coordinator. Either way, the CAB investigators were left thinking an engine was missing, and this impression lasted long enough for the spokesperson to brief the Trib reporter, who then got it a little garbled in retelling.
This small puzzle feels almost parenthetical. The odd story of the missing engine does not by itself prove that engine four was left at the tracks. But if engine four did indeed land on the rails, my confusion scenario explains how an engine could be reported as missing for a day, and therefore constitutes circumstantial evidence which is admittedly thin but entertaining.