Re: NNG. ATSF 5000 in Amarillo

Sounds to me like the city's powers-that-be have discovered that the locomotive could be worth a couple of million bucks... as scrap. I'm thinking that they hired a scumbag lawyer to word their RFP to eliminate the group that was trying to restore her, and invested heavily in work done so far. Maybe BNSF might take a look-see into this... as I understand it, many locomotive donations come with a clause that states that if the group that acquires a donation locomotive wants to dispose of it, it reverts back to the originating railroad (in this case the BNSF as successor to the AT&SF). Or, again, maybe not...

In either case, it would be a shame to scrap it... steam locomotives don't grow on trees, and the technology to reproduce one doesn't come cheap... ask the guys who want to build a new PRR T1. They are estimating a cost of over $20 million dollars. Unfortunately the infrastructure required to build these machines no longer exists... and the labor to do so would have to be trained from scratch, as would the engineering expertise. And once you get one built, then comes the cost of maintaining it and running it.

I don't expect this to end well... unfortunately.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2016 05:45PM by BillD.