Grassroots Railroad Sports?

NickD said:

Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to NickD :

Wow, I didn't realize it had a cosmetic restoration. I expected it to be similar condition to the ones you posted above. 

So, just heard that the Bonhomie & Hattiesburg Southern Mikado, #300, that is on display at Hattiesburg, Miss. and formerly owned by Fred Kepner, has been sold to Valley Railroad of Connecticut. They sent some guys down at the beginning of this month to tear into it and make an evaluation of it's mechanical condition. I'm curious to see what they find, since it's been sitting outside in humid conditions for 50 years with it's boiler jacket and asbestos(!) lagging in place. I also know there are some parts like, like some of the side rods, that are missing. It's been sitting in literally the same exact spot since it's donation and the only work done to it was the painting that the city received permission from Fred Kepner to perform. Definitely an odd choice, since the Valley Railroad already has three operational steam locomotives, and this one is halfway across the country from them and likely in very poor condition. But, since it's one of the Kepner collection locomotives not in Oregon, it's up for sale and probably is being offered cheap. 

The tale of this poor locomotive continues to get stranger. The city of Hattiesburg has now filed a temporary restraining order against the Valley Railroad and a petition for a declaratory judgment. 

The crux of it is that Hattiesburg was under the impression that the city owned the locomotive. Fred Kepner bought the engine from the Bonhomie & Hattiesburg Southern in 1968 and at that time, Kepner was granted permission to keep the locomotive in the B&HS engine house in Hattiesburg, but subsequently he had to move out when that house was demolished. Kepner then appealed to the Mississippi Great Southern Chapter of the NRHS to store the locomotive, and at that time the locomotive was moved to the present location on Alabama Great Southern Railroad property. Hattiesburg, Mississippi then bought out the property in 2000 and is laying claim to the locomotive, claiming that they assumed the locomotive was abandoned.

The other side of the story is that Fred Kepner passed away in October 2021, and this is the reason his sole heir is now trying to sell the locomotive. The heir secured an agreement to sell Kepner's collection of locomotives to the Oregon Coast Scenic Railroad (which is a nonprofit). At this point, the Valley Railroad Company seems to have asked OCSR whether they could buy it, and had the locomotive assessed for restoration potential. Deciding it was a candidate, Valley has contracted to buy the locomotive, with the intent to move it to the Valley's shop in Connecticut (this is where the CT comes into it) sent a mechanical crew to Hattiesburg to determine whether it would be viable to restore the engine to steam operation.

The city's claims on the locomotive get really murky, with them making multiple contradictory claims all at once. They simultaneously say in the same press release that they thought the locomotive was abandoned and that it fell into city ownership as a result, that they thought it came with the property when they purchased it, that they didn't own it or know who owned it, and that one-third of the interest of the locomotive had been held in the trust of a woman who recently passed away and the city purchased that portion of the interest from that estate. Like, pick a story and stick to it. You can't claim you own it, you didn't think you owned it, and you thought you owned it all at the same time. 

There's also some other weird contradictory statements in their release. For example: "As I understand, the locomotive has been at our train depot for over 50 years and many generations have come to identify that locomotive with our downtown and train heritage." But yet in those 50 years, you never once attempted to figure out who actually owned it, and also, if it is such an important part of your city, why was it rotting away until a couple years ago? Also: “The City of Hattiesburg would like to request that the locomotive be transferred to the City of Hattiesburg’s ownership. By doing so, the city would then be in a legal position to expend public funds on the locomotive and begin to develop a preservation plan for the train. As a public entity, we are eligible for several preservation opportunities, that, as a privately owned train, the locomotive has never qualified before.” That sounds like they are admitting that they don't own it, and it's also weird that they said they can't legally spend funds on the locomotive, but then go on to say they spent $50k on it having it painted a couple years ago and a bunch of money on the display and don't want the locomotive to leave after that. Also, why were you spending money on something you weren't sure you even owned? It really just seems like they are grasping at straws, especially because the claim of 1/3rd ownership only surfaced recently after it came out that someone was looking at purchasing the locomotive.

I have to wonder, if the 1/3rd ownership that Hattiesburg claims is valid, is the 2/32rds ownership that Valley Railroad purchased from the Kepner estate enough to allow them to still move and restore the locomotive. And if the city is that upset that "their" locomotive that they either don't own at all or only hold a 1/3rd ownership in, is being sold, then they should just buy it out from Valley Railroad. The city can either buy out the Valley Railroad 2/3 interest and own the locomotive with full title, or the Valley Railroad, can try to cut a deal with the city, to either buy the city 1/3 interest or cut a deal in which the city leases the locomotive to the Valley Railroad. If the court rules in favor of Hattiesburg, then there also exists the potential that Valley Railroad could go after the Kepner estate for damages if the estate claimed that they owned the full title to the locomotive. A messy situation, regardless, and likely one that will tie up some time in the courts.

A take on the situation by a gentleman who is quite well-versed in legal cases regarding railroads. His view is that the abandonment claim is the city's strongest claim to the locomotive but it appears as though the city never did the due process for taking ownership by abandonment. 

I believe the City's best (and most likely to succeed) claim might be the ownership interest they acquired in the locomotive if they can substantiate the claim sufficiently. Their "abandonment claim" is undercut by a number of pieces of evidence introduced so far. The first being the tone of their initial email asking that the locomotive "stay" in its longtime home; and the second being that the City made a point of acquiring an interest in the locomotive from a party they contacted after researching title to the locomotive. If the City felt they had a good basis for their abandonment argument, they would not have taken any action to acquire some form of title in an asset they already owned by virtue of its "abandonment". They would certainly not be asking another party for the locomotive to "stay" either.

In addition, in order to perfect "title" to an abandoned piece of property, there is a process that must usually be followed. While the process varies from State to State, the process usually requires public notice, and then a formal Court-approved procedure to remove the asset from a public space. My guess is that the City did not follow any of the procedures for dealing with abandoned property because they presumed the locomotive was likely owned by the local NRHS / historical society and never bothered to investigate the title to the locomotive until it became apparent that the locomotive was sold to an entity with the financial means to actually remove the locomotive from the site.

This turn of events leads me to ask the obvious question; Is it known just how strong the Kempner ownership interests in all the locomotives he allegedly owns really is? It sounds to me that some parties might want to review their Bill of Sale to insure that they have obtained good title to their equipment.

I'm sure that taxpayers of Hattiesburg, MS are going to end up spending a significant amount of money trying to perfect title to the locomotive. As for the Valley RR, if the City is able to successful demonstrate that Kempner did not have full title to the locomotive, I'd give serious consideration to suing the Kempner Estate for damages if the estate falsely claimed it had full title to the locomotive.

This is going to be one hell of a mess to clean up. I would suspect that the Valley RR would have walked away from the locomotive if it had known of the title issues beforehand.

Want a chance to ride in the cab of NKP #765 on one of Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society's Edon, OH-Hillsdale, MI trips on October 1st? Then just donate $358 to their restoration effort of NKP SD9 #358. 

Following five years of restoration work, the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society’s volunteers have successfully restarted the prime mover engine of historic Nickel Plate Road diesel locomotive no. 358 and have launched a matching fundraiser to raise $20,000 in order to complete the effort.

Donations will be matched from now until August 21st. As an added incentive, one donor of $358 or more will win a day-long cab ride on Nickel Plate Road no. 765 during an all-day steam excursion on October 1st. Two donors of $35.00 or more will be entered to win tickets on board the same excursion.

Donations can be made online at fwrhs.org/donate or by mail at
Project 358
PO Box 11017
Fort Wayne, Indiana, 46855

“This vintage Electro-Motive diesel is poised to start a new life as a railroad tourist attraction, and over 8,000 volunteer hours have been contributed to breathing life into the machine,” stated W.D. Miller, Manager of Project 358. “This restoration has been supported by so many people from across the country, and we’re hopeful that railroad and historic diesel fans will help us reach this important milestone.”

Plans call for the 358 to be restored to its original, as-built 1957 appearance with the Nickel Plate’s characteristic black and imitation gold striping. The locomotive will eventually enter rail tourism service as part of the Indiana Rail Experience and become an educational resource in excursion and exhibition service with Nickel Plate Road steam locomotive no. 765.

“Railroad technology is always advancing, and we really have a unique opportunity to tell the story of how the railroads evolved from steam locomotives to modern internal combustion engines and the cultural and technological changes that occurred because of it,” explained Miller. “This project has already afforded several of our members the opportunity to develop critical mechanical skills and experience, and in the future, will give our guests hands-on experiences that bring them closer to this great history and important industry.”

Project 358 has been previously supported with grants and donations from Steel Dynamics, Inc., the Nickel Plate Historical & Technical Society, Inc., Norfolk Southern, and Progress Rail, Inc.

An interesting fact that flies under the radar is that, in addition to Nickel Plate #765, the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society actually owns two additional locomotives. The first is Nickel Plate H-6b 2-8-2 #624, once infamously referred to as "200 tons of junk" by Ron Ziel in his book. Donated by the NKP to the city of Hammond, Indiana, it was almost immediately vandalized and fell into a severe state of neglect. It received one cosmetic restoration in 1971, as well as removal of the boiler jacket and asbestos abatement at the same time, and then was severely vandalized again. In 2017, the city of Hammond donated the locomotive to the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society and it was moved from Hammond to New Haven, Indiana. Due to the early removal of the boiler jacket, the boiler has been found to be in excellent shape, but 60+ years of neglect and abuse also have taken their toll. While they would like to return it to service, or at least get it cleaned up and presentable, there is no timeline for a restoration and it remains a rainy day project.

The other engine is Wabash 0-6-0 #534, one of only two surviving Wabash steam locomotives. It was operated by the Wabash until 1952, when the Wabash began aggressively dieselizing, and then was sold to the Lake Erie & Fort Wayne Railroad, where it eked out another five years as their "One-Spot" before being retired and donated to Swinney Park. In 1984, Fort Wayne donated the #534 to the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society, and it has undergone a slow cosmetic restoration with possibility to operate one day.

In reply to NickD :

Wow, that sure is a clusterberkeley in Hattiesburg. I wish I'd remembered about #300 when I went through there a few months ago. I was near the Amtrak depot, I'm not sure if that the same line #300 is stored near, but if so I probably was close to it. 

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

Yeah. A messy situation. I wonder how many of the other Kepner locomotives have similar legal complications. 

I'm not saying the city is in the wrong, but so far their claims seem to be clumsily desperate or desperately clumsy.

An interesting photo of Great Western Railway of Colorado 2-10-0 #90 in service and still bearing some sort of accident damage. The #90 was involved in at least a half a dozen accidents, was rolled on her side twice in grade crossing collisions that killed the fireman both times, and was damaged when used to retrieve the GWR's other engines from the burning roundhouse at Loveland. Today, Great Western #90 is better known as Strasburg #90.

Learned so much about steam engines reading this book.  1906 San Francisco, an investigator is chasing a bank robber that never leaves witnesses, then comes an earthquake.  Bad guy hikes a train south to make a run for the Canadian border.  Inspector hires a Baldwin 4-6-2 (4 wheels under the catcher, six 81" drive wheels and 2 under the cab).  Interesting chase through the mountains, but it does 100mph in the desert.

I'm about 50 pages from learning how it ended up at the bottom of a lake......

In reply to 914Driver :

I had tuned out on Cussler's later Dirk Pitt novels because they got a bit too formulaic, but the Isaac Bell stuff brought me back. He had clearly done a bit more research on railroading since he had written Night Probe, where he has a crack passenger train for a fictional railroad being hauled by a 2-8-0. Another one of the Isaac Bell novels, The Wrecker, is also very heavily railroad based. There's a part where he mentions them parking a loaded train on a bridge to stabilize it during a flood and that was an actual tactic done by railroads. ATSF did that with three 2-6-2s and two 2-8-2s to stabilize bridges over the Kaw River near Topeka. It didn't work though, and the bridges washed out. People have bandied about "What if we could find those?" since ATSF strangely didn't preserve a single Mikado. There is one account of the water getting low in the river one year during a drought and one of the locomotives was visible again, so ATSF sent some guys from the Topeka shops down there with torches and had them cut it off level with the bottom of the river to keep it from being a navigational hazard, but I've never heard definite confirmation on whether it was one of the Prairies or one of the Mikes.

Great Western of Colorado #90 with a train of sugar beets near Loveland, Colorado on November 26, 1957. From this angle you can see the extended smokebox that GWR added to make it steam better on the low-quality lignite that GWR fueled their locomotives on. This extension was present on the #90 at Strasburg until 1993, at which point they put it back to as-built configuration. Personally, I think she looks better without the extension.

Great Western #90 has a different boiler tube pilot from the plate pilot in these photos. The boiler tube pilot shows up in photos of it on the GWR in the '60s, so presumably this one was damaged in one of the #90's accidents and swapped out. In addition to Strasburg removing the smokebox extension, they also removed the sand dome between the cab and steam dome and took off the coal bunker extensions on the tender to improve rearward visibility.

GWR #90 with a Rocky Mountain Railroad Club excursion in October 2nd of 1960. The heavy smoke might have been at photographer request, but also crews at Strasburg mentioned that when GWR extended the smokebox, they added in a Cyclone self-cleaning front end and it was installed incorrectly, resulting in #90 being impossible to keep a clean stack no matter how well you fired it.  Combined with the fact that it made it a real pain to get to the front tube sheet to do any work on it with the front end in place, and they decided to remove the Cyclone front end and the smokebox extension, since they had the original blueprints. They said that after they did it, they got the usual screams of "ruining the engine" and "destroying it's history", and they said they had one fellow who had just complete a very nice live steam model of #90 when they removed it that said "Do you realize what you just did to me?" 

Both Joe Collias and Ron Ziel reference that during the early '60s, when Great Western #90 was still hauling sugar beets and excursions in Colorado, railfans simply referred to it as "The Decapod" because it was the only 2-10-0 in operation. Collias also mentions going out to ride behind it and he walked into a depot and asked the ticket to purchase a ticket. The depot agent asked "Do you know the last time I actually sold a ticket?", since the Great Western had never been a big passenger operation, and began rummaging around trying to find a ticket book. When he couldn't find it, he told them they didn't need a ticket and to just go wait out on the platform, but Collias said he really wanted a ticket as memorabilia and the depot agent got all flustered.

A 1937 photo of #90 at Loveland. It has the original cab still, the original larger headlight without a visor, it hasn't had the smokebox extension or the second sand dome installed, the coal bunker extensions have been added and the smokebox is painted with graphite instead of the later white silver. It also has the original Baldwin boiler tube pilot, which was later replaced with the solid pilot (I'm going to guess after the 1944 collision when it also is believed to have received the new cab). I'm not sure when it had a boiler tube pilot reinstalled, but the 1963 photos of it in excursion use on the GWR show it with the solid pilot, while the photos of it doubleheading with CPR #1278 on the CNJ, which was immediately after Strasburg got it, shows it with a boiler tube pilot.

In 1963, the Illini Railroad Club essentially rented out CB&Q O-5a Northern #5632 and a bunch of passenger cars, along with the passenger cars that the club owned, and took a jaunt across the Midwest behind the big Northern for a week. Hard to even fathom the concept these days. One of the places they went was to the Great Western of Colorado, which interchanged with either the CB&Q or their Colorado & Southern subsidiary. Shown here at Longmont, Colorado, the little Decapod meets the huge, ill-fated CB&Q Northern.

With #90's 100th birthday coming up in 2 years, I wonder if Strasburg will do anything special for the occasion, like put it back in the original livery and lettering/numbering? She has a fellow Great Western of Colorado engine operational not that far away, 2-8-0 #60 at the Black River & Western, that would be kind of neat to see the two of them reunited, but I don't think that will happen. 

Great Western Railway of Colorado had three other steam locomotives at the end of steam operations, all 52"-drivered Consolidations. #75 and #51 are shown doubleheading with an excursion in this photo. The #51 spent some time on the Fillmore & Western and these days is privately owned and tucked away on the Hudson Terminal Railroad, coming out to shuttle around the yard about once a year. The #75 went to the Heber Valley Railroad and operated there for quite a while, as well as making some movie appearances over the years, but has been out of service since 2002 and under restoration since 2008.

The third Consolidation, #60, ended up coming east to Black River & Western and is still in operation there. 

Just finished reading a book that may be of interest to some who frequent this thread: M. John Lubetkin's Jay Cooke's Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, the Sioux, and the Panic of 1873. I bought it more because of its relevance to the later campaigns of the Sioux War (notably the Little Bighorn), but it provides very interesting insights into the early days of railroad building in the West, and just how interconnected all of the factors mentioned in the subtitle really were. Recommended.

Well, it took me 6 weeks, but I finally made it through all 216 pages worth of material here. It was well worth the journey & not something I would have expected from a motorsports board. As a long standing fan of steam & gen 1 diesels the info Nick & the rest of the posters here provide is outstanding. After RYPN Interchange, this has become my next stop.

Like a few of you, I am very lucky where I live in terms of access to tourist & shortlines. I'm just outside of Philadelphia in Lansdale, Pa. Within 2 hours of me, I can access the Black River & Western, Delaware River Excursions. New Hope & Ivyland, Wilmington & Western, WK&S, Cape May Seashore Lines, Strasburg, RM of Pa, Steamtown, Jim Thorpe & Reading & Northern. And I might have missed a couple. Plus I have the short line Pennsylvania Northeastern and their mix of older EMDs & GEs. My nick is an homage to the Reading & the Pennsy whose lineage is all around me.

I look forward to reading all the new entries and hope to contribute here & there when possible. Keep up the great work!

Nickd, it would be great to see Black River & Western #60 head to Strasburg in 2024 for a 100th celebration with #90. Both in Great Western lettering in a doubleheader would be so cool.

Of course for that to happen #60 would need to get back under steam. Spoke with someone at BR&W yesterday and they said the hope was August but admitted it's later than originally hoped for. Fingers crossed.

In reply to ReadPenn :

I thought BR&W #60 was running. It was back in June of this year.

That's interesting Nick. I actually spoke with someone there just yesterday. I was looking to get my dad out for trip. He's a big steam fan but at 82 yo with failing health I call before going now b/c I don't want to waste a trip for him. The person I talked with said #438 was handling the trips until at least August.

I didn't get the idea it was for a 1472 or the 5 year or anything but the individual talked about work being done on the engine and it being sidelined for a bit.

Hopefully nothing major and she's back out there as soon as she can.