I was wondering if anyone could shed some light into what goes on with the Ohio Central Steam program? In one of the recent posts here, some one commented on how the Ohio Central just decided to cancel passenger excursions for next year, yet it seems like quite a bit of action occurs out of their steam program none the less. For example them just recently purchasing NKP 763 to restore for operation.

So out of curiosity do they run their steam program to make money, or is it a rich guy who likes to collect and run steam locomotives from time to time over his railroad?

Checking out their website, they appear to have quit the collection of locomotives http://www.ocsteam.com/index.html 9 of them out of which most of them are stored and operational it appears, yet few of them seem to run much according to their website.

Seeing so many locomotives stored serviceable, how come they keep buying up and restoring more, yet rarely running the ones they own?

Do they have a museum or something to display their locomotives at? It appears that they recently loaned out one of their locomotives to a tourist line to run for some time.

Is it me, or am I the only one who finds this kind of weird?

Adam

As near as I can determine, this is an individual (Jerry Jacobsen) who has made a quite successful operation out of his freight railroad, and has decided to spend some of his profits on collecting/operating steam locomotives. This individual is absolutely a hard-core rail enthusiast--I have heard from major collectors who have dealt with him on stuff like builders plates for years before he was a major player in steam locomotives.

As I am told, the reason the steam excursions ended has less to do with liability costs than the fact that the freight operations of the railroad are growing by leaps and bounds--occasionally, the railroad has had to press "collection" diesel (and even once at least steam!) locomotives into revenue service simply because everything else was "maxxed out".

Insofar as this collection goes, this is literally no different than an executive spending his big income on a Ferrari/Maserati, a yacht, a car collection (see Jay Leno), or vacation villas in the Carribbean. He made his money, he can do what he wants with it as long as it's legal, and there's no law against collecting steamers, hoarding them, and/or making them operable for no sensible reason. Ditto certain diesel locomotive owners. We can be lucky that we may get the chance to see/photograph/ride/etc. their "toys".

Meanwhile, however, never get too comfortable with what you see. There are precedents for such collections, and not all of them have ended in a totally positive manner. Remember Jensen's steamers in Chicago? The Paulsen Spence collection? The Steamtown collection in Vermont? the Blue Mountain & Reading in Pennsylvania, with mainline trains behind 2102 and PRR E8s? I have no reason to worry one iota about the Ohio Central collection that I know of, but just in the past month we've witnessed the breakup of one minor collection--including sale offers on eBay--strictly because of a divorce, or so I'm told!