Recently I've been wandering around the internet of the whereabouts of the Custom Fabricators trains and thought I should post my findings here if someone else is interested about these park trains. For those of you who don't know, Custom Fabricators was a company that had built five 2-4-0 steam outlines made out of frames from 0-4-0s and ran on Detroit Diesel engines hiding in the tender. Four of the locmotives went to the two Great America Parks, and one ended up in Ramada Express in Nevada. Over the years at Great America Santa Clara one of the locomotive's was just used to repair the other. In 2001 the Railway was removed and the equipment sold off. I recently tracked down the red locomotive that used to run at Santa Clara's Great America. After being sold on Trains-Trams-Trolleys, it sat in Williston's Crossing RV park in Florida after a plan fell through to expand the RV park with a train ride and various other amenities, it seems recently the locomotive ended back on RailSwap recently. Rumors on RYPN that if the equipment does not leave the park grounds, it will just be scrapped as with a 2-8-2T ALCO some coaches, and a tender. Hopefully someone out there can save it.
Link to 0-4-0:
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railswap.org]
The other mystery Custom Fabricators locomotive was the one at Ramada Express. It was the last locomotive built by the company. It started life out as a 2-4-0 but it seems it was later modified at the hotel with an extend pilot and smokebox to be a odd looking 4-4-0. But just recently it seems that the hotel has stopped operation, I cannot find any information about it on the Hotel's website, or any recent photos of it. A quick google search shows that the last time someone caught it in action was sometime in 2006. The locomotive looked well maintained compared to it's Great America counterpart, and I assume that the locomotive is still somewhere on the Hotel grounds, but if anyone has any information please post here.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/09/2013 09:49PM by jmarty009.
