I thought I saw a street view picture of them in winter, a few years ago.
They look very overgrown now.
They could be combined into one cosmetic restoration, I guess.

There’s also a former store/post office/station at Alledonia, a couple of miles west. Mower Brothers still belongs to the family, but it’s a private residence now. If you take the bridge across Captina Creek and turn right just past the long white building you can see on Google Earth, you’ll be driving on the old rail bed. It’s uncommonly smooth for our local back roads and will take you all the way to the former site of Coats Trestle, most of the way to Woodsfield. The road goes on up to Rt. 26, which is decent the rest of the way. There are a bunch of railroad-related sites in Woodsfield itself, and the museums’ docents know enough to send you around.

Car #5 was something to see while the family was taking care of it. They also had a boxcar (behind 5 at right angles) that was a storage shed, though I don’t know what shape it’s in now. I do believe the Parry Museum (in town) had to scrap their two cars. Up toward the east end of the line, the small town of Shadyside has an original small tool shed and half a passenger car sticking out of the wall of the civic center meeting room thanks to Clyde Kennedy gathering up pieces and hardware from several other cars. Come on over to the OR&W Facebook group if you partake of the site.

The railfan community has been aware of coach #5, the railroads business car , for years. Transferring to a museum would have been nice, but I don't think that was ever the case. The car was for sale, at a high price. A good twenty or thirty years ago a fairly well known railfan who makes his living in the railroad preservation and restoration field looked into buying it, and I believe the asking price was over 20 thousand. The situation never changed, and pretty soon the car will be a good source of hardware. The interior was once very intact, including beautiful original light fixtures.
There have been several great efforts to save OR&W passenger cars, but almost all were just too late. By the time the cars were brought in to be sheltered or restored, they were too far gone. Ohio isn't Colorado; wooden stuff rots away in the wet weather and anything wooden sitting on the ground is usually too far gone to even lift up without collapsing.

brian b

Is/was this a complete car with trucks, or body only?

No trucks on coach #5, but just about everything else is there, as far as the iron and steel parts. End platforms, railings, and the truss rods. The car sits up off the ground on blocks under the bolsters, better than the wooden frame sitting in the mud.
Narrow gauge car bodies in Ohio and Pennsylvania survived for the most part because in the twenties and thirties the railroads bought aftermarket metal roofs and fitted them to the wooden cars. Some passenger stock came from the factory with metal roofs, soldered at the seams. Cars with the metal roofs survived until the roofs rusted out and the cars rotted away. Seems around the 1990's the roofs started giving out, and a number of cars used as sheds and hunting camps caved in from water damage and heavy snow. Coach 5 is loosing its roof.

brian b