February 2021

The talented, experienced and dedicated steam locomotive repair and restoration experts at the Age of Steam Roundhouse Museum work diligently to locate, acquire, and install rare appliances for accurate physical representations of all 23 of these beautiful beasts currently housed in the museum’s collection.

As for those locomotives being rebuilt for return to operation, sometimes the exact, old repair parts are not available. Beggars can’t be choosers, and back shop workers must select close-substitute items for acquisition, restoration and attachment to bare boilers. Difficult-to-find items—such as injectors, turbo-generators and cross-compound air compressors—sometimes can be substituted with similar, suitable replacements that will not adversely affect a locomotive’s operation or performance. If a replacement steam pressure gauge were selected for use in the cab, few folks would ever know or care if that gauge was not original to the engine. But if a totally wrong major appliance were applied—such as a big, flat, side-mounted Worthington feedwater heater instead of a smokebox-mounted, cylindrically-shaped Elesco version— the visible and operational differences would be quickly known. That doesn’t usually happen, as such large items are difficult to remove, so stayed on the retired, preserved locomotives.

But more common, easily removed collectible hardware—such as builders’ plates, bells, whistles and headlights—were often “liberated” (stolen) by souvenir hunters from long lines of locomotives headed to the scrap yards. Sometimes a down-and-out old steamer would be selected for donation to an on-line town, pulled from the dead line, and spruced-up with parts liberated from other unfortunate locos still in line. So, oftentimes the original items are not those seen on saved locos.

Perhaps the most collectible locomotive hardware items are builders’ plates. With large numerals, they carry a locomotive’s specific, identifying serial number, thereby serving as birth certificates of sorts. Those serial numbers are easily checked and recognized as being accurate or not, and therefore, great care must be given to builders’ plates for application to preserved engines, as plates must be selected carefully, or reproduced accurately, to maintain a locomotive’s historical identity.