Eric Ross Wrote:
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> Hi everyone! I have another research question.
>
> I’m trying to figure out how much a locomotive
> would have cost when new. After looking through
> advertisements and catalogs for Baldwins, Shays,
> Climaxes, and Heislers, my search has turned up
> nothing. I was wondering if someone could point me
> in the right direction; it may just be that I’m
> looking in the totally wrong places.
>
> Thanks,
> Eric
Prices were highly variable. In addition to the boom-bust economic cycles of the civil war through WW2 period which drive prices up or down based on economic conditions/demandm in any era some builders were considered "higher end" and charged more than others. On top of that steam engines had a huge amount of variety in fittings, options, and finish. As everyone on the board knows, prices had a long-term tendency to trend ever upwards over time both due to inflation and due to the locomotives themselves becoming ever larger and more complex. Only way you can be fully sure what an order cost is to look up the records if they still exist, otherwise the best you can do is estimate. Sometimes specific numbers also pop up in publications like Railway Age (it's been around since the 1850's) but that's a LOT of reading and something you'd do over the course of months or years, not immediate.
During the mid/late 1870's period when the U.S. was recovering from the panic of 1873 (but had not yet fully recovered) the most expensive builder on average was Mason, its locomotives quite often costing in excess of $10,000 (and supposedly Mason barely broke even--it spared no expense!). Companies like Rogers or Baldwin were upper-end for that era but not quite on Mason's level of fit and finish. During that same period a new Baldwin catalogue narrow gauge standard-type passenger engine might've cost about $7500 to $8000. A lower cost builder of the day like Brooks might've offered a equivalent-size engine for more like $5500 to $6000. Porter focused solely on smaller engines mostly for suburban or industrial work; its engines were specifically designed with ease of maintenance in mind in addition to being generally on the less expensive side up-front. The cost savings are very evident even in photography based on the lower-cost builders using much simpler painting and general finish, simpler frame design requiring less in the way of careful machining or fitting, fewer options, and so on.
Builders changed over time themselves. During that 1870's era Baldwin was regarded as a good builder, and by the late 1880's it was widely considered about the best in the business. It got perhaps a little complacent, gradually fell behind ALCO after that corporation's formation, and by post-WW1 (and most especially after the post-depression downturn that Baldwin never truly recovered from) Baldwin had become a relatively lower-end builder, generally behind Lima or Alco and commonly cheaper.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/13/2020 01:43PM by James.
