While visiting the Illinois Railway Museum today, I read a couple of interesting things on the informative signage for the following steamers:

N&W 2-8-8-2 #2050 was donated to IRM by Armco Steel (I can't remember the name of the town/city where the mill was). I'm assuming it was used in stationary boiler service.

L&NE 0-6-0 #207 was save from the scrapper by Nicholson and used to switch cars on a dock in Detroit until about 1960, eventually making it's way to the museum.

This reminded me of a thread I started back in April about surviving Lima diesel switchers. It seems most of the survivors wound up at either Armco or NT&D before being preserved.

So my question is this: Did these companies have executives who were railfans/preservationists and went out of there way to acquire these interesting locomotives? Or, was it just coincidence that both wound up with some unusual motive power?

BTW, it was nice to see the decapod in operation. I've missed it the last several years because the family has always gone on Father's Day, and steam has never been in operation. It looked and sounded great! Could anyone from IRM give an update on the progress with the UP 2-8-0?

In the case of Armco it was mostly a coincidence. The 2050 and other steamers were bought for scrap at the Middletown, Ohio plant. At some point it and two others were used as auxillary steam during an outage of one of the boiler houses. I had a foreman cleaning out his desk give me pictures of the three with large pipes connected to the steam domes which fed the coke plant steam lines. Two were scrapped and the 2050 was saved for "just in case" which to my knowlege never happened again. It sat outside the open hearth for many years until IRM acquired it. They spent close to a year polishing journals, crank pins, etc, so it could be moved. I had a foreman who, once he knew I was a steam fan, told me a story of how they would throw rocks at the headlights and number boards of the steamers sitting in the scrap lines inside the mill. Makes me cringe.
Armco bought some Lima diesels new but bought many from B&O, NYC, Erie, and others after the railroads had worn them out. Armco would run them until they dropped and would then replace it with another from the long lines they had stored dead. The first time I was at the Middletown plant in '80 or '81 they had 30 or 40 sitting in line. Their last use was at the ore dumper at the blast furnace. At one point only two were left running and five or six sat in various states of disrepair. The plant manager would make his rounds every day and I bugged him every day for probably a year to donate them to Whitewater Valley in Connersville, Ind. I finally gave up and after about six months of silence the phone rang one day and it was the plant manager. He asked "Do you still want those locomotives?" and within a few weeks we had them ready to go to Indiana. Shortly afterwards a scrapper was hired to cut up the other five or six. Armco also donated all the spare parts stored at the roundhouse which amounted to three semi trucks full.