I would ash Mr. Campbell this question. "do you want the 643 preserved or scrapped?"

This CAN be a situation very much akin to the tow truck driver seeing you broken down 1,000 miles from home, saying "what's in your wallet?"

ANY situation like this is fraught with a large number of variables. Among them are the urgency of the move, the flexibility of the scheduling, the location, and the party doing the asking.

Mr. Moneybags/ a PowerBall winner telling them to move it by June 30th is going to get fleeced.

A professional railroad company--the Strasburg, the Reading & Northern, Age of Steam, etc.--would be able to negotiate favorable conditions and terms with a railroad or other industrial company.

The Friends of the RR Museum of Pa. or a similar outfit working for a major institution could earn themselves a discount with GENEROUS publicity (and tax-free donation status) from prospective logistics and transport suppliers. (This will take a LOT of them no matter how you ship it.)

People in the position to donate their services or equipment do so when THEIR schedules and stars align right, not YOURS.

Which all goes back to the question I posted earlier:

Is anyone in a position to step in and negotiate for time, donations, favors, etc. if and when it's the 11th hour and 59th minute, AND it's indicated that some other title-holding entity is willing to dicker, barter, etc.?

In regards to the boiler it was reported to be exceptionally clean. All this really tells us is that the boiler MAY require fewer cubic dollars to pass inspection but of course there are no guarantees. The tubes are the same ones installed in 1955. Supposedly the wheels and axles were inspected and repaired where necessary by the prior owner.

I would imagine that it would be something along the lines of - "donate it free of charge to an organization that is willing and able to finance the transportation of the locomotive to a new home before the July 1st deadline.

Answer...agree to donate the locomotive if he can find anyone willing to accept the donation in return for their commitment to have it moved by July 1st. or whatever deadline is worked out with the new property owner.

With only a little more than a month 'till July 1st. that would be a miracle.

IMHO-Ross Rowland

Okay that is what I thought. He should just give it away, but even that is likely to be impossible.

But now that you mention it, what do we know about this "July 1, deadline" to remove the engine from the site, supposedly because the site has been sold? Did the seller state this to be a fact somewhere in this process? If not, how can this information be verified? Certainly it is a critical claim because it makes all the difference in the world to the value of the locomotive. So how do we know the land has been sold and the engine must be off the property by 7/1/19?

We don't, to be honest. We have hearsay.

But at its absolute most cynical, imagine that Monday morning, July 1st, some contractors roll in and start smashing the loco to smithereens and hauling its ruins off.

Preposterous, you say?
That's what we/they all though about GTW 5629 being scrapped by Metra in Chicago in 1987. But it happened.(With court orders and sheriff's deputies involved, mind you.)

Never mind that Jensen was awarded, if memory serves right, $1.7 million in a jury decision in 1978 for compensation for the C&WI scrapping his OTHER big loco, CB&Q 5632, which if memory serves was still being appealed when he died in 1991.

Mind you, there are/would be legal machinations and angles aplenty involved. Mechanic's lien, abandoned property, something in the property sales contract, whatever. For all we know, this is all underway behind the scenes, and come July 1st..........

Or, just as likely in my opinion, come July 1st a couple people are going to be cluelessly mumbling "NOW what the #(*+&%!@ do we do?!?!?!?!"

The only hope for this loco, it seems, is that someone is TRULY prepared for the latter scenario.

So this claim that the locomotive must be moved in a month or scrapped is just hearsay? A rumor?

And the point is to get us to all swing into action in case scraping this locomotive is a possibility? Meanwhile this wild rumor has probably beaten all the sales value out of the engine and made scrapping the only way to sell it. Could this rumor be made up by people with an axe to grind with the owner, or people who want to panic the owner into giving the locomotive to them?

Scrapping is always a possibility. Being prepared for it personally is fine. But that does not give people a collective right to publish that dreadful outcome as a certainty, and blame it on owner for trying to sell the engine rather than donate it to somebody. This rumor may have lowered the value to the point where nobody will accept the engine for free. So rather than avoiding scrapping, this negative gossip could well bring it about.

I was raised in a household of journalists, a field where they routinely say "If your mother says she loves you, get confirmation from other sources."

There are folks here who have alleged that there is a deadline for moving it off the property. Random "blowhards" don't tend to congregate on this forum. I see these sources as better than most with regards to this situation. Moreover, can anyone demonstrate that there is ANYONE in a position to benefit from a depressed price or "free" locomotive? Every last discussion I have seen, here and elsewhere, has either treated this thing as a hot potato, an albatross around the neck, etc., or used the words "They should...." Until someone, ANYONE, out there--the BOD of the Age of Steam Museum, the Friends of the RR Museum of Pa., the Illinois Railway Museum, some casino in Vegas, whoever--says "WE should....", this whole discussion is moot.

There have been about THREE DECADES of opportunity for someone to walk up and haggle with the owner, with money or no. Our field even has a professional operation that is alleged to have looked at this loco in the 1990s but didn't pursue it far enough. We even had, for a spell, the proverbial "Mr. Moneybags" walking around and buying up steam locos big and small, and he never got this one.

Moreover, this is (unless someone can prove otherwise) a private scenario between two private entities--the (supposed) owner of the loco and the (supposed) property owner, be it the same ol' party or a recent buyer. We could probably ask the parties directly and get three different stories by now. They have no obligation to tell us anything. Their only obligation is to act in their own self-interests, be it financially, logistically, or morally.

All we can do, morbid as it sounds, is perch like vultures on the nearby phone lines and wait........ and, sadly, this is not the only such situation in our field, or even in this commonwealth.

Every prospective buyer is in a position to benefit from a depressed price or a free giveaway. So there is a huge motive to paint a picture of the engine being worth nothing because of all the problems that can be dreamed up and spread around.

In the three weeks that it has been on Ebay, the price has dropped from $575,000 to $350,000. There is no indication that the seller will sell at a depressed price or give it away.

OK, try this on for size: given the deadline as published and the logistical issues involved in the move, would there be any potential candidate available and able to get her someplace safe even if she was given for free?

By my accounting, she doesn't pass the "gift test" unless there's an underling motivation such as a mission of interpreting that railroad or than industry coupled with a very large bank account devoted to that mission........ I don't know if there's such an entity out there and that's the entire potential market I can imagine.

BTW, forget about handwringing over the boiler et al. If nobody is going to move her with plans to run her and the wherewithal to do so it is an immaterial diversion at best and waste of bandwidth.

They've had several offers at $100k but turned them down. There are at least five qualified parties investigating the engine and its removal right now.

Thanks for the info! Glad to hear that wheels are turning behind the scenes. I think this is the first solid information that's been posted here.

Thank you Mr. Lynch. So the asking is somewhere between $100K and $350K. Can you confirm that the real estate on which the locomotive currently sits has gone to contract and that the equipment will have to be off the property at some point after the real estate transaction closes? If so, what is the deadline that has been imposed by the purchaser of the property? Thank you.



Very true and that is after fifteen pages and (now) 224 posts.