Seems pretty high. Seems doubtful age of steam would have dropped $2m on a brand new locomotive when they could have bought and restored one for half that price.

Why do people buy new cars when they could just buy a beater from a junkyard and rebuild it?

What if the model you want hasn't been produced for so long there aren't any beaters left to buy?

How much is it worth to know you can actually get new parts for your car instead of having to custom make something when an unobtainably obsolete part breaks?

There's a lot of good reasons to invest in a replica if it is what you need for your business plan and fulfilling your mission.

I've been around both of the Kloke Locomotives and photographed both pretty extensively. As has been noted, these engines were largely built based on the drawings and tooling developed by O'Connor Engineering for the construction of the two Golden Spike replicas in the late 1970s. I believe that Mr. Kloke obtained access to the plans and patterns via an FOIA request, since they are property of the United States Government.

Of the two locomotives, Leviathan is clearly a more accurate replica....essentially a copy of Jupiter, because Leviathan #63 was a sister to Jupiter. Leviathan was never intended to be a regular, working locomotive, but more of a touring, demonstration article, so she is more historically correct. She has an oil-lamp headlight (augmented with LEDs for limited night ops) and a link & pin drawbar on the pilot. The major obvious concessions are that she has air brakes, a Janney-type coupler on her tender and is oil-fired, because wood firing would raise all manner of concerns at various operating locations.

York #17, on the other hand, was built for a tourist railroad and was indeed designed to be a working locomotive. She is based loosely on the plans for the UP 119 and is a Rogers replica vs. Central Pacific. Like Leviathan, York is oil-fired. It reduces the fire hazards and makes refueling very easy. Unlike the 119 she was patterned after, York deviates from the design with a Yankee-type balloon stack and a strap-iron pilot. York also has a Janney coupler on the pilot instead of a link & pin drawbar, as the customer needed to be able to perform switching moves and to run in reverse, although they don't typically do much reverse running in actual practice. York has an incandescent headlamp in the light box, which is powered by a gasoline-driven generator. Originally, that generator was hidden in a compartment in the tender, but it tended to overheat, so it is often placed on a coach platform behind the engine. York also has an incandescent rear headlamp on the tender, in a lightbox similar to the one on the front of the engine. Again, that was for reverse running, which they ultimately elected not to do. I believe that the tender was originally on friction bearings, but as I understand it, the railroad has recently replaced those with roller bearings. Again, they use the engine quite a lot, so it will be interesting to see how it holds up over years of service.

Both locomotives are pretty replicas. Having also been around a couple of very well-kept, historic originals (V&T #22 and B&O #25), I think that the vast majority of viewers would find them thoroughly convincing. It takes a little bit of railroad knowledge to tell the difference.

/Kevin Madore

The Jupiter and #119 replicas, built by O'Connor Engineering under contract for the National Park Service, cost 1.5 million dollars (1970s). As the development of the 700+ engineering drawings and casting patterns were under a separate contract, I don't know if they were included in that cost figure. Part of the NPS requirements in the contract terms were that the replicas be built to within + or - 1/4" of the originals. Since there was scant available drawings and specs of the actual two locomotives and O'Connor had to refer to basic engine specifications, drawings of similar engines built by Schenectady (Jupiter) and Rogers (#119), as well as old photographs of the engines, it would be hard to say if they hit right on the nose, but obviously very very close.

The NPS offered all the scanned engineering drawings on CDs and were sold at the Golden Spike Historical Site sometime ago and I believe they are available online. Kloke also obtained use of the wood patterns for castings.

They, as well as Leviathan and York are beautiful locomotives.

I didn’t say it didn’t make sense to invest in a replica, I just think $2m is a high price to pay to get an operating steam engine.

Uh, have you seen some of the recent restoration costs? $2 million would only be a down payment on most. Even with max use of volunteers, there are still a lot of things that will have to be bought or services paid for.

Now, think of starting from scratch.

If your goal is to end up with a locomotive that has an 1860s appearance, which was the case with Steam Into History, what choices do you have? Yes, there are a number of cosmetically-restored originals around, but they are typically among the most highly-valued pieces in museum collections and unlikely to be released without significant compensation. Even if you could acquire such an artifact, the amount of work/reconstruction required would likely cost as much or more than simply starting from scratch with fresh materials. I know of several locomotive restoration projects in which the owners attempted to repair old boilers....and in the end spent more money than they would have on a new boiler....and still ended up with an old boiler, albeit repaired. At least with a Kloke Locomotive, SIH ended up with a new steam engine. And yes, $2M was the figure that I heard from various sources in 2013 when York was delivered. No idea how accurate that information was.

/Kevin Madore

James Fouchard said:

While it is very clear that O'Connor Engineering built the locomotives, what is not totally clear to me is the extent to which they prepared the drawings for them. It was reported by Ed Kelley in an early (January 2003) "Discover Live Steam" article, that the drawings for these locomotives were prepared by Keystone Light Railway Company of Hermine, PA. This was a firm by Carl Auel and Walter Teskey that had undertaken many small gauge, and some standard gauge, locomotive, equipment, and railway projects.


To what extent the drawings were prepared by Keystone, and very likely revised by O'Connor, would be interesting to know.

It is well documented that O'Connor and his staff researched and drafted all the engineering drawings for this project. Gerald Best assisted in providing the research. I myself have never heard the story of the involvement of Keystone. There is the story of the abortive attempt before the 1969 centennial for the NPS to have replicas built. A supposedly well-qualified locomotive draftsman was hired to research and produce the drawings. But as a one-man operation he could not make the deadline to produce such a quantity of drawings in time and reportedly had a nervous breakdown and burned all his drawings. This was before O'Connor was brought in. It was O'Connor and not Best that supplied the drawings to the NPS. Best was a consultant to the NPS on the project. Keystone may have been one of the other bidders for the construction contract, but I would doubt they redrew any plans produced by O'Connor, or that they produced the original drawings and O'Connor revised theirs. O'Connor had mentioned in one of the published books that his firm wound up the high bidder on the construction contract and the NPS was going to award it to a lower bidder, until it was realized that one of the contract terms was that the company was to have a qualified mechanical engineer onstage and that the lower bidder did not. So the NPS awarded the contract to O'Connor Engineering.

Thank you James,
I am certain that any engineer would have taken full ownership of all drawings they produced, so it is good to know about the production of O' Connor. I would not be surprised if a nervous breakdown would have been realized in the first attempt at drafting, and am curious who said to you that those drawings were burned?

In the end, it is amazing these locomotives have been re-created, and then re-created again. (and perhaps, again?)
O. Anderson

Just how much do you think 4014 is or has cost the UP to get up and running. I've heard conservative estimates in the 4 to 5 million dollar range for this overhaul.

This was from the book "Promontory Locomotives" by Gerald M. Best, recounting the initial effort in 1966 by the National Park Service to produce replicas of "Jupiter and 119 in time for the Centennial of the Golden Spike Ceremony.

It is also mentioned in the book "Rebirth of the Jupiter and the 119" by Robert R. Dowty.

Thanks for those references. It is an interesting story, with several tales of failure and success. Perhaps I will finally make it to Promontory Point this year to partake in a celebratory photograph.

Triple that figure and you will be close. Remember they spent well over a million on it before it ever moved to leave the park.

I understand that Kloke paid to have the NPS drawings scanned in exchange for use of the patterns...

Randy