Did I miss this posted here, or has no one posted that the Royce Kershaw (sr. and jr.) vehicle collection, including some railroad equipment and W.T. Smith Lumber 2-6-0 #7 is up for auction in February?

https://www.aumannvintagepower.com/auct ... 397/photos

Wow! That 2-6-0 is a sweet little engine, and selling for no reserve. I wonder what condition it is in, and how complete it is. It appears to have received a UT survey.

Does anyone know the story on the little doodlebug that in listed as well? Makes Strasburg's LO&S look enormous.

Hick's Preserved Traction Blog has a post with some information (and links to more info) the shop were this collection is at was the location of the reincarnation of Edwards Rail Car Company that went defunct around 2008.

https://pnaerc.blogspot.com/search/labe ... %20Company

From the auction catalog:

Click here for photo.

I think almost everybody who worked on steam in the 70s through 90s has been involved with the beautiful little logger at some time or other except those who actually live nearby. It's already had some running gear work done, boiler is in decent shape, the dome was a Baldwin forge welded longitudinal seam which I actually found a reference for with a very low efficiency rating...... but the metal was very thick so for a little 160 PSI coffee pot not at all unusable. I'd certainly consider it as restorable without too much heavy work. RK liked to take pauses in the stream of work to rethink things which made it somewhat frustrating to try to maintain a project's momentum. Gary Bensman and Grant Geist left a lot of stuff there which had been well picked through and parts had been strewn here and there such that finding things and reassembling after machining, etc was an interesting treasure hunt. Royce owned an airport with a railroad track running through it behind his newer plant which he wanted to reconnect with a like running through the old downtown into the W of A shops ruins, and an ancient brick kiln industrial site as an industrial history attraction, but that didn't seem to gain a lot of traction to grow. He had some really good guys working on his auto collection working there and we all shared and helped each other out. I wonder what the Maxwell will go for.......

Is that 2-6-0 the engine referenced in Dave's 2003 RyPN Articles section piece about surveying steam locomotives for restoration? The "Third Case"?

Howard P.

Feel free to chuck tomatoes at this one, but the whole 'gotcha' of the Edwards Motorcar restart was that an EXISTING Edwards car was actually grandfathered by the FRA for heavy rail use, but a NEW build was not (and subject to new passenger car construction standards), which is how WVC got into a bind with the FRA and the "Mountain Salamander" could only be run on rail that was not in the general system or with an approved temporal separation plan - which was really hard to get.

So an 'original' Edwards car is signicantly more usable than one of the new builds. That's how the Skunk was still OK, same with the LO&S motorcar.

So it's not just cute.

So they wanted to use this vehicle for intercity passenger or commuter service? That would be the only service where new passenger construction standards would apply...

MDR

There were maybe 3-4 motorcar bodies the reborn Edwards Car Co had stored at that site, not sure when and where they went away...... and I brought in a Cincinnati Curveside streetcar body from an old boy scout camp and restored it as the centerpiece of a development in Marietta, GA. RK also had a wooden office car he wanted to restore, which had been cut and pieced together in amazing ways. The more I remember the more colorful it all seems looking back a couple decades.

Are you referring to the one at Marietta Square Market?

Its remarkable that yet another Cincinnati curvesider has survived. I know of two that lasted late but were lost. Do you know the car number? it was not painted on the restored body at the Marietta Market. The car is at this time not on the PNAERC.

A quick response from Frank Hicks answered my question. Damn Shame is all I can say about the real estate developer who destroyed a restored carbody.
https://pnaerc.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-l ... sider.html

The carbody was in rather poor shape when it was retrieved. Early adoption of aluminum castings and lightweight construction kept close to the ground at the site made for a semitricky rigging job...... fortunately enough original aluminum window hardware castings remained for us to make a full set of right and left hand patterns for Bama Foundry to cast.The interior was tunneled and floor rotted. Yes it had folding doors. The car was structurally repaired, then we built two sets of heavy industrial casters on framed and welded them to the bolsters with cross bracing so the car could be rolled around. One sliding panel door was built from photos, all windows and interior woodwork were replicated, and the bulkhead between the passenger compartment and motorman's station was filled with a full size blown up photo of the motorman's station from an old book Gary had printed on Gatorboard by Aho and Barbat in Marietta - beautifully done. The passenger compartment was being envisioned as a sort of meeting / display / leasing space at the time. At no point was any consideration made for potential operation or further restoration for other purposes, not that it couldn't have been done until it was cut in half. I'll see if I can dig out my old file to see if I had any idea as to the car number.

2465

Thanks Dave. Sorry that all your good work went to waste. I am assuming the missing half or 2/3 of the carbody have been scrapped. Correct?

Hope someone saves the Texas interurban car and restores that one to electric operation.