Around 10 years ago my neighbor died, and I wound up picking this off the curb. I was hoping to get some information about it. It seems as though it may be a reproduction as it says it covers engines 5405-5444. Otherwise I have no idea about it. A few people have sent me offers on it, but I don't want to get scammed as much as I wouldn't want to scam someone else. I plan on scanning it on a large format scanner at a local library, would it be permissible to make the scans available online or in some other format? Thank you all for any info you can provide!

Here is a link to 2 pictures, an overall and a detail of the information:

http://imgur.com/a/x1GTk

If there is no copyright markings, you should be free to copy it.

Nice find for Central aficionados.

I tried reaching out to them with no response.

You can scan it at Kinkos/Fedex Office on the large format scanner. At the same time, have a photo copy made, so you have one to work off of instead of sending the original through everytime. Its the same machine, and can be done at the same time. Something like that should cost about 15$ to do.

I believe this information could find an online home in the archive for the SteamTech list. Hugh Odom would know better than i do about posting a digital version there.

I had the complete set of ALCO drawings for our Coos Bay #11, 2-8-2T, scanned at a local blueprint outfit. This was a total of over 600 sheets of various sizes, up to and including large ones like the subject of this post. All in pdf format, on several CDs. Total cost was around $500, for the CDs plus one hard copy of each drawing. If someone needs a hard copy, just take the CD to any copy place with a large format printer. And, the drawings can be viewed on any computer. For the large drawings, or course the detail is pretty small, but you can view one section at at time at 100% scale. The original ALCO blueprints are stored in the archives of our research library.

That was pretty much my plan, as I only have the one sheet. I'm assuming that this is a pretty common piece, does any one know?

NYCSHS most likely has the original linen drawing that your blueprint was created from, as they had been offering copies of drawings for years. I am certain that they have side elevations of the Hudsons in their collection.

The only thing that might make your copy of this drawing somewhat unusual is that clearly, it was stored folded. Which makes it likely that it is a true New York Central RR copy, not one made later from an archived original linen. The copy was made when the drawing was at Revision "C" - somewhere on it there might be notes with the date and reason for the two (or three, depending on NYC practice) revisions to the drawing. If the original linen still exists, it would be interesting to see how many further revisions were made and when - if a Revision "D" was made and noted, it would help pin down the age of your drawing.

It's likely the blueprint was issued to one of the Mechanical Department offices or to a shop facility, and stored in a filing cabinet there. Your neighbor probably got it when the railroad threw it out after all the J-3s were scrapped.