Les, yes this sign now resides in our museum and the nice gentleman made the front page of our newspaper for his 63 year old crime.

Steve

Steve -

Glad to hear that the sign is now on display. Here's another example of an employee saving an artifact. Gentleman came to HVRM one day and mentioned that his father had been a conductor on the C&O. Steam was taken out of service on the Chicago Division and a number of locomotives were stored in the dead line in Peru, Indiana. The guy saw those engines sitting there and finally decided to liberate an artifact from one of his favorite road engines. His son and his brother asked if we would like the artifact at Hoosier Valley. Here's a photo after it was put on display. Perhaps the gentleman got permission from his superiors to remove it, perhaps not. But whatever, we're now sure glad he did it!

Les

That is a rare find.







Just a side note about Baldwin:

http://archives.hcea.net/?p=creators/creator&id=380

"The Lima Locomotive Works (Collection 462) entered the construction equipment market in 1928 when it purchased the Ohio Power Shovel Company (Collection 2934) as a division after assembling Ohio shovels on contract. The latter firm may be descended from another firm, known as The Ohio Steam Shovel Company while based in Toledo in 1903 and 1904, The Ohio Steam Shovel & Dredge Company in Cincinnati between at least 1910 and 1916, and again as the Ohio Steam Shovel Company in Lima, date unknown.

Lima merged with General Machinery Corporation of Hamilton, Ohio, in 1947 to form the Lima-Hamilton Corporation, which in turn merged with the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1950 to form Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton Corporation (BLH, Collection 135); with that merger, the Lima locomotive line was discontinued in favor of Baldwin’s. B-L-H acquired the Austin Western Road Machinery Company (Collection 10) in 1951, and Madsen Iron Works (Collection 993), a manufacturer of asphalt plants in La Mirada, California, by 1956. Madsen had been in business since at least the 1920s, with facilities in Huntington Park, California, and Los Angeles, California, and it also produced a roadmixer and a line of fire hydrants.

B-L-H continued to produce machinery under all three brand names; in the mid-1960s, it also introduced a line of wheel loaders and a small crawler asphalt paver bearing only the BLH brand. Armour & Company acquired B-L-H as a subsidiary in 1965, and sold all of the construction equipment lines to Clark Equipment Company (Collection 252) in 1971. The paver had already been discontinued, and Clark ended production of the BLH loader in favor of its own and in the 1970s spun off the Austin-Western crusher line to Eagle Crusher Company (Collection 613). Clark discontinued the asphalt plants between 1973 and 1976, and absorbed the Lima and Austin-Western names into its Crane Division in 1978. The Crane Division was dissolved in 1981, and the Lima plant was closed and all production of products inherited from B-L-H ceased that year. Clark itself exited the industry years later, as will be discussed, and Eagle Crusher continues today."

Austin-Western was in Aurora and employed around 1,000 people. The street sweeper production at the old Whitcomb plant only lasted a couple years.

Steve

I have a pretty thick Whitcomb manual which I'd sell for a reasonable amount. It is for an ex-military unit....one of the bigger ones. If interested, PM me.

WK&S steam railroad in Kempton, PA had a small switcher for many years. At one point it was for sale, and I thought of buying it.....but the clutch was out and it was a Fiber-disk-type clutch...which was kind of scary and I really wanted a running/runnable loco at that time.

Regards,

DaveW.

Quite a find!

Dave, check your PM mailbox.

Steve

I was pretty excited about that coming to light and the museum was also. Now to get that 65 tonner from Mason City.

Steve

A couple weeks ago a descendant of Charles Olson who was manager and vicepresident of Whitcomb after WW II donated a substantial collection of Whitcomb photographs and some sales literature. Among the photographs I found was this one which may seem rather ordinary except for the two young ladies on the locomotive. They looked very familiar to me.



A close up gives more details.



Compare them to this photograph of William Whitcomb, president of the Geo. D. Whitcomb Company, his wife, Julia, and two daughters, left - Georgiana and right - Kathleen.



I am pretty sure those two young ladies posing on that Whitcomb locomotive are the daughters of the president, William.

More to come.

Steve

It appears that the Whitcomb 65-DE-19A at Mason City, Iowa has been purchased and is moving to the Netherlands.

http://globegazette.com/news/local/worl ... 68527.html

Our city apparently could not afford to do what the Netherlands can, and they are spending a lot more to move it over an ocean than Rochelle would have spent to move it one state away.

I'm glad that it will be preserved.

Here is a video of the Whitcomb being loaded onto a ship at Milwaukee -

http://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/wwi ... etherlands

They will restore this unit back to running condition and use it to give rides at their museum.

Glad you mentioned it, the locomotive is in good hands! The most expensive part of the travel to the Netherlands was not the thousands of miles of the Atlantic ocean, but the transport from Lehigh to the harbor within the USA.
While we are at it, their website mentions that they do not have the manuals.
Is there a possibility to help them? Looking at the pictures of the inside of the cab, I can image that they are scratching their heads.
Kind regards
Jos Koopmans

Try the California State Railroad Museum for Whitcomb manuals. They got a couple of truck loads of material.