In trying to review the situation regarding that motley collection of equipment in Oregon reputedly owned by Fred Kepner, here's what I seem to be seeing:

*Someone apparently claims to have the right to sell the equipment, due to unpaid storage, equipment not being removed, or whatever. Kepner/his attorney loudly disagree.

*I've never seen a deed or title to a locomotive.

*Cass is acting as if it has concluded a conditional (pending a grant) purchase of Pickering 8. Obviously they have to have offered money to someone, and/or someone offered them the loco at a price. To whom/whom?

This is looking scarily like the infamous scrapping of Jensen's GTW 5629. Metra scrapped the loco after numerous attempts to evict; Jensen later won a court judgment against Metra for $1.6 million for the act, apparently because Metra forgot to dot an "I" or cross a "t" in the legal documents. I never heard if the Metra appeal reduced or reversed this judgment. I never saw anyone claim that Metra scrapped it with no warning; as I heard it from Chicago folks, the matter was an ugly brawl for several years, with Jensen's various injuries compounding the matter.

When Mr. Hansen has to resort to emotional appeal in claiming that someone is trying to "steal" Pickering 8 and other locos, I have to be skeptical. If I were attempting to forestall foreclosure on my property for unpaid fees, I'd certainly engage in creative spin-doctoring and half-truths to win sympathy to my side. I've also seen, and in one case sadly been in, friendly "handshake" deals that went suddenly or gradually sour, so I could see a whole bunch of claims and counter-claims piling up.

So is there anyone out there with a neutral, third-party sense of what the heck is going on with this collection? Will I be forced to mentally write off this collection as "lost", or will we just have to wait for a certain person to drop off this mortal coil, as we did with the "Lost Engines of Roanoke"?

Is there a consolidated list of what equipment Kepner has and where it all is right now?

I'm not a lawyer but from what I recall from "the exam" about property under the Uniform Commercial Code which has been adopted with some mofications by many if not most states.

Locomotives are what used to be referrred to as "chattel" or moveabe property. They don't have deeds or titles the way automobiles or real estate do, and as moveable property can held "hostage" as collateral if a provider of services or labor executes and perfects something called a "mechanic's lien". There are a variety of ways to acquire property under the UCC, and as I recall, ownership of abandoned property can be perfected by possession (finders keepers) alone.

Nonetheless, these issues are often complicated -and the only impartial opinion that will matter if ownership rights are disputed will be that of the ruling judge from a court with jurisdiction, if the argument goes that far. Anything else is merely speculative.

Someone help me understand the whole Kepner thing, from what I have seen over the years, it seems there is some nice hardware here, but is unsheltered from the elements and wasting away.
There is a website that tries to encompass the collection at
http://www.sunsetd.com/~ryan/steam/

So is Kepner a collector? a steam speculator? Somewhere I read this was to be the nucleus of a logging museum that never got off the ground.

Mr. Kepner is all the above. Like anything there are two sides to the story but the end result is:
Yes the equipment is out in the elements.
They did not get scrapped!

Issue got hot about 7 years ago and nothing until this thread.

Responses to the above:

Typically there are THREE sides to a story like this: in this case, Kepner's, the property owner's, and the murky excuse for the truth in the middle.

[edited to remove response to misread "out in the elements" as opposed to "out of the elements"--my bad....]

They did not get scrapped--yet. And I think anybody reading/posting on this board regularly will concede that absent any serious effort at restoration or preservation (which the circumstances seen in the online photos is definitely not), then you've got a parts junkyard, not a railroad collection.

One last thing: the aforementioned "sunsetd" website implies that there is, or will be, an ownership dispute over GN 2-8-0 1246. Confirmation/details? Does the City of Seattle even care?

"out in the elements" meant just that. Out in a field not in a bldg in the elements.