The CPR "Mike" in Depew, N.Y. needs a friend, for sure.
What strikes me about the plea for funding is the implied assumption that a Chinese locomotive is going to be better, simply because it's newer. There are scores of American and Canadian steamers needing restoration, if not just preservation, across the continent. Agreeing with the earlier poster, get a place to rebuild and run.
I think this is a railfan's naive dream.

I think a lot of us tend to blow off these crowd funding projects as not likely to bring in serious funding, and that appears to be accurate for the project that's the subject of this thread, as well as many others.

OTOH, it's impressive what a well-organized crowd funding project can do. One example underway right now is the "Bring Back MST3K" project on Kickstarter. A lot of you here are the right age to remember this TV show (full name- Mystery Science Theater 3000) from the early days of Comedy Central (1980's/1990's) and later the SciFi Channel: 2 robots and a guy are stranded in space and forced to watch really bad "B" movies, so they add appropriate commentary to the movies as they watch.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ms ... gbackmst3k

In a little over 3 weeks (5 days remaining in the campaign), they've raised over $3.8M, enough to hire staff, build new props, buy the rights to movies, pay awards and Kickstarter fees, and make something over 6 episodes of the show. For a fairly obscure cable TV show that's been off the air for more than 15 years, that's pretty impressive. The hope is with this demonstration of serious interest from viewers, they'll secure the backing of a network or other provider (Netflix for example).

It's been well-organized, periodic big news announcements have been made to keep backers interested, lots of media platforms have been covered, and clear explanations of how the money will be used have been provided.

From what I've seen, this would be an excellent campaign to emulate if you ever wanted to try crowd funding for your project.