Steve Vallee wrote:

I spotted this tidbit on page 133 in the October, 1937 issue of Railroad Magazine:
. . . during the St. Patrick's day flood in 1936 the Pennsy dumped a lot of old hopper cars over the bank near Johnstown, Pa., to keep the river from undermining the track.

SP did this kind of thing several times along the Eel River in northern California, especially around the heavy floods of 1961 and 1968, and many of the steel GS gons used are still there (with bent frames, etc.). I saw some of them a few years back. But I'm not sure this qualifies as an "odd" use.

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