That engine was in a river for decades before someone hauled it out. I used to live in Tallahassee and have looked over that locomotive very carefully. The iron is in horrible shape, looking like badly weathered wood in some places. At least one of the drivers is suspended in mid-air, having been frozen into place after being underwater that long. It’s such a shame that they never tried to build at least a replica tender for the engine. The cover is new and I’m glad they finally have at least a partial cover. But in all fairness I can’t see how Florida rains could harm the engine any more than being underwater all that time already did to it. The truly sad thing is that the location the engine is no longer publicly accessible. There’s a security booth you have to get by and you risk arrest if you hop the short fence on a weekend (when nobody is there to allow you to walk down to the engine). You can see it clearly from the road, about 100 yards away.

Sometimes things don't need to be "restored". Sometimes they may not even need to be conserved. They've been part of the landscape, indeed, maybe part of the earth, for so long that that's where they belong.

A case in point is what's billed as "The Last Train to Nowhere" just east of Nome, AK. Three New York Elevated Fornies standing silently on the tundra, where they've stood for the last hundred years now. NOTHING could give a more evocative illustration of the vastness of the land, and the brevity of human endeavors there. Would it really make more sense to slather gaudy paint on these wreaks and present them as New York Elevated engines?



Do they really need to be restored? Do they even need to be conserved? They've been here for a hundred years. All the wood is gone from the locos, as is most of the sheet metal. I dare say, in another hundred years, they will not have changed much... I would imagine the last of the timbers from the cars will have disappeared, leaving little piles of iron hardware, but the locomotives will still be recognizable as what they are.

The real question is, in another hundred years, will anybody care?

Preservation ("conservation") of iron and steel artifacts that have been underwater is an enormous problem in the world of maritime museums & underwater archeology.
There are many technical papers, books, and and scholarly studies on this subject. See http://nautarch.tamu.edu/CRL/conservationmanual/File18.htm for a glimpse of the wealth of knowledge available.

The best case for well-preserved objects underwater is a cold oxygen-free freshwater environment - say buried in a peat bog or encapsulated by clay (which seals out oxygen), and/or at the bottom of Lake Superior. Worst case is warm, oxygen-rich, saltwater corrosive - for example exposed to breaking ocean waves, halfway out of the water.

There are many cases where bringing the object into the air (lots of oxygen) simply accelerates the deterioration under expensive time-consuming (i.e. years of treatment) measures are taken to stop the internal and external corrosion.

- Doug Debs