I have three from the Lehigh Valley.

1. LV inspection engine "Dorothy" was purchased from the railroad and privately owned. The owner ran it on a loop of track on his estate. He died, and his widow then donated the locomotive to a WWII scrap drive.




2. About 1950 the LV offered to donate, for free, a 4-8-4 Wyoming to Sayre PA, to display in a town park right next to the LV's yard and passenger station..Sayre said "no thanks, we dont want it." The 4-8-4 then went to scrap with the rest of them..



(today there are zero surviving LV steam locomotives)

3. And a recent one..a LV GE U23B, one of the LV's last new locomotives, was donated to a RR museum/Historical society. The museum only had to raise the funds to move it. But the timing was bad..the museum was just starting up, and was spending most of its efforts and money just to get the new museum up and running..about 5 years went by, the museum had been raising the money to move the locomotive, and was finally in a place where they could start working on getting the U-boat..they contacted the locos owner..the donation had changed to "its for sale, if you want it"..Not having the funds for the move *and* the purchase price, the museum reluctantly had to pass..the locomotive was then scrapped.

Scot

Speaking of scrap drive locomotives

The Last Narrow gauge Mason Bogey off the Denver South Park and Pacific was scrapped around 1942. It was thought at the time to have operated on a local railroad, but more then likely was the last remaining South Park Mason Bogey. Was scrapped for the war. None of the Mason Bogey's from either the South Park or the Colorado Central remain. All have been lost to time. I believe the one at Greenfield village may be the last one in existence.

Yes, it is.
Only two Mason locomotives survive, the Mason Bogie "Torch Lake" at the Henry Ford museum/Greenfield Village. And the "William Mason" 4-4-0 at the B&O museum.

Scot

Ah. Well, this clears up one of the mysteries (from the OR&W Yahoo group):

Becky:

Regarding the Last run of the OR&W:
The Monroe County Historical Society in Woodsfield has one copy from Clyde Kennedy collection of three 16 mm film rolls of the last run. Frank Curtis had the second copy and Rex Armstrong's daughter has the third copy. I have a CD copy of same taken from Frank's copy.

M-1:
I have no info on this.

Bill Logan

(He means the EM-1 and I'm fairly sure he does know the difference.) I need to rifle through Monroe County's Digital Shoebox Project page to see whether they've put the video up along with the numerous OR&W photographs they have. As for the EM-1, that's going to have to wait till Monday because I don't see it in the library's History Online section.

As I recall this locomotive was mentioned in the Colorado RR Museum's annual about the South Park. It was at Iowa State University at Ames, Iowa, having been given to the school by a local contractor who had used the locomotive.

There were two locomotives at University of Idaho, Southern Branch, that were cut up for the scrap drive. One was a BLW 1878 narrow-gauge 2-6-0 last used by the Sumpter Valley and originally used on the Utah & Northern. The other was an old standard-gauge 4-4-0 from the Union Pacific that the UP rebuilt in 1891 from an unknown older locomotive which might have been on the line in 1869.

You could write a book about all the historic treasures lost in ww2 scrap drives. Old church bells, civil war artillery, you name it.
The Smithsonian gutted their ww1 collection for wartime scrap drives along with many surviving ww1 tanks, which is why they're so rare today.

Not to mention that the scrap drives were unneeded if looked at from today. I can see why they might have been viewed as necessary then, seeing as only top men knew we had the bomb, but it seems we lost a lot due to it. The USS Oregon seems to come to mind as one of the biggest losses. (A Pre-Dreadnought Battleship, the only surviving one of the Spanish-American War. She was sold for scrap after being a museum ship for 16 years. There are no surviving Pre-Dreadnought ships in existence now, save for one in Japan.)

Howdy Folks: Not sure how much truth in this story, but when I was working on the New Hope & Ivyland back in the early 70's, I was told by an ex Erie Lackawanna brakeman, recently retired, that the Erie had set aside two of it's Pacific's for preservation. One was sent to South Korea to help with the rebuilding of the railway after the Korean War, and the other was held for a few month, then scraped in order to get the locomotive off the books in order not to pay tax on her. The Korean pacific was scraped in the early 60's, but I never was able to confirm the story of the other 4-6-2. Also, I heard a story that the New York Susquehanna & Western's last "Russian" 2-10-0 was considered to be saved by the railroad after the RS1's arrived, but went to scrap because the NYS&W needed the money. Have fun boys, David Notarius, Cambridgeshire UK

I'm not passing judgement on the veracity or lack thereof of that story, but the "Erie Pacific that was saved but got scrapped/is still in North Korea today" is possibly the most repeated "urban legend" in rail preservation regarding "one that got away." I suspect it has more to do with population density as a function of popularity, combined with "not one Erie steamer saved" than it does anything else.

I have to agree with Alex #4 regarding the Erie Pacific, at least the one in Korea. There have been several attempts to verify if it exists and everything comes back negative. She was there, but now she ain't. There was also at least one Pennsy B6sb sent to Korea, but nobody foams over that one!

The N&W A was one of three at Union Carbide. By the time Blount arrives, the others were heavily burned apart, and 1218 actually had minor damage. It was pulled aside and missing parts were taken off the doomed locomotive for those missing from 1218. Amen!

Until the early 1970's at least one Y6b remained partially burned in a Roanoke scrapyard (ref. "Steam in the Sixties" by Ziel and Foster).

According to Train Mag., three PS4's sat waiting for a friend and only 1401 was saved. Pretty difficult imagining these losses in today's light. The "Pocono" illustrated earlier in this thread is a heartache, but aren't they all?

Paulsen Spence had aquired a number of Steam Engines to create a steam operated railroad the Louisiana Eastern, but he died before the line was was realized, there were 3 NKP hudsons, plus others, only 4 survived from the collection.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=35300&p=199278

I think a recent article in Trains or R&R covered it.

Hi,

Gainesville Midland Railroad here in GA is known from running decapods until 1959 when SAL took over the line.

In the late 1960's and early 1970s SAL lettered an SD40-2 (no dynamic brakes) as GM #10. In 2000/2001, it came to notice to a few people that although it was labeled for Fmaily Lines, it was still in one piece. Supposedly it was offered to Gainesville GA (unconfimed) but the ex-GM yard no longer passed by where GM 209 (decapod) was displayed and there was no room for the diesel.

Supposedly, the frame still exists but the rest has been parted out to other locomotives. Too bad. The only GM diesel missed being preserved.

209 and/or 10 would have made a nice pair for a excursion line or dinner train down the former GM.

Doug vV

The story of the Lehigh Valley inspection loco #1 "Dorothy" is a bit more complicated than described. It had two or three private owners before going to the WW II scrap drive, depending on how you want to count them. It was retired and privately purchased by John Vaughn of Kingston, PA, in 1934, and ran on his Vaughn Central RR which also had a couple of narrow gauge Vulcan mine locos on it. Vaughn was a retired banker and had been a director of the Vulcan Loco Works, although he had no other connection with the railroad industry I know of. Upon his death it went to Frank Mitten in 1939 as Mitten was a LV official who helped Vaughn get the loco. Mitten moved it to his property in Bear Creek, PA, where he and his buddies used it for their poker games like a clubhouse. It didn't operate there, just sat on a short piece of track. When Mitten won a hand he liked to ring the bell. But when he died in 1943 his widow donated the loco to a WW II scrap drive. Mrs. Mitten would have been the third private owner.

One treasure that was not lost to a WWII scrap drive was the sailing ship STAR OF INDIA ("the world's oldest active sailing ship"). The iron-hulled ship was built in 1863. The story is that a ship surveyor took a look at it after there was an outcry to include it in the scrap drive. He reviewed the ship and said that the metal was not worth the effort of cutting it up. That evening one of the supporters of the ship ran into him at the downtown hotel and cried in this drink about the poor condition of the ship -- the response was no, it was in good condition, do you think I would let her get cut up. Well, the masts were taken down for airplane clearance and carefully stored on board for future restoration.

From the traction division, one kind of San Francisco Muni streetcar that didn't get saved was the "Type L" built by St. Louis Car in 1927-28. These cars were in the 189-213 series and all were scrapped in 1957-58. According to one story, a preservation group had put in a request for one, but when the Muni manager wanted it off the property, the group wasn't ready to take it. There may have been one or two "reprieves", but finally Muni got tired of waiting and gave the group a "drop dead" date. When they still weren't ready to pick up the car, the manager ordered it scrapped immediately. It could have been worse; Muni Car 1 was recently restored to "good as new", and four other "iron monsters", 130 and 162 (at Muni), 171 (at Orange Empire) and 178 (at BAERA Rio Vista Jct.) are preserved, but the "Type L" was the "one that got away".

Going back to 1950, as the Pacific Electric was fading away, a group of traction fans tried to raise money to buy unique wooden interurban 999, but the funding drive fell short and the car went off to Terminal Island for scrap.