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https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... -michigan/

According to a Trains article, it was just being moved from one storage site to another.

"E&LS President John Larkin told Trains News Wire he had the unit moved to open space in the shop for covered hoppers to be cleaned. “We will be using track one and track two in the building washing off covered hoppers cars inside and outside; in so doing there will be water on the floor and we certainly don’t want to get the traction motors on the RF16 wet,” Larkin said.

Larkin says he’d like to restore the locomotive some day and has the parts to do it, but acknowledged it would be a “tough project to do” that would involve a lot of time and expense. “In 1991, when Baldwin was getting out of the processes, I bought a number of items that could be used either for a Baldwin RS12 (which E&LS was using at the time) and/or an RF16. The problem was that even though we put the materials in storage, people would take a part out and use it to repair other Baldwin engines and by taking the parts out, we don’t know how many or what type are gone,” he said.

“I would hope that at some point to rebuild the 1216. The last time the late Fred Cave (former Baldwin Locomotive manager and mechanic) was here, we shot a 608A bedplate and put the crank in the bedplate with the proper tensioning so that at some point it may become economically feasible to rebuild an RF16. My main objective is to keep the locomotives out of harm’s way.”"

So do the side panels exist?

From the article I linked "Recently the railroad conducted an inspection of the unit, removing some of the side and radiator panels for inspection." So it sounds like they are there, just removed.

The last pictures I saw, which were supposedly recent...under 10 years?...the roof and sides appeared to be on it.... So, my guess is they have them somewhere....

I'm still wondering if he has that Pennsy Doodlebug #4668...

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LANDSHARK!!!!

Actually since D&H served Scranton there could be any number of reasons for the Sharks to show up.

PRR preferred to run K4's versus their BP20 Passenger Sharks. A friend saw a 1950's PRR study showing the K4's were cheaper to run until they needed shopping.

Phil Mulligan

"A friend saw a 1950's PRR study showing the K4's were cheaper to run until they needed shopping."

Man. I'd love to get my grubby mitts on something like that.

Other than to preserve the last of the breed, and considering the four Santa Fe Pa's claimed by a nearly 100% ALCO railroad, why on earth did D&H grab something as eclectic as two Baldwin sharks? Thank heavens they did!

Bruce Sterzing, President of the D&H explained that they were about to scrap a bunch of freight cars. These two units were available as an equal swap for some (or all) of the freight cars. D&H was power-short at the time, so they made the deal. The units supposedly fit the needs of a couple different assignments that the D&H had.

JR

That was his story and he stuck to it. Thankful for the rest of us he did.

Funny how this was almost in the 'legend' category for many years. Heck, you rarely ever even heard someone lie about "a guy I knew" who actually saw them. People generally accepted they were in that building, but that was it.
Suddenly, they got outside after all these years and we were reminded of them!

It's my understanding that in later years Baldwin offered a conventional throttle as an extra option in place of the air throttle that they used early on, making them able to play nice with other manufacturers. Is that true and are #1205 and #1216 so equipped?

One of the many colorful stories from the old Michigan Northern involved running a train with two Sharks but only one functional air throttle. When the one with the working throttle wasn't leading, one trainman would ride it and operate the throttle, and another would run the brakes from the lead unit. They counted on the sound of an application to wake up the guy in the second unit.

Aarne Frobom
Big Hole, Michigan