I started wondering after seeing this photo: http://www.pbase.com/rpdoody/image/93910377 It's a monument to the first train robbery attributed to the James gang. Clearly the tracks are gone now, but I can't help but wonder where the found this wheel? How many severed wheels are out there that aren't already attached to a locomotive?

I have no idea where this wheel came from. Another severed wheel or wheels I can think of is a display in a museum in Japan of the wheel or two, number plates, and other bits from a particular steam locomotive; they have them hanging up on a wall.

In the former Soviet Union, it was popular to cut the front of a steam locomotive off (usually just behind the front pair of main drivers or cylinders), and mount it on a plinthe. There is a wall against the back of the "locomotive"; sometimes, it is made to appear as though the engine is emerging from a tunnel or roundhouse.

Locomotive drivers, or driver centers, weren't all that uncommon around shops. They became surplus when they developed a crack or defect of some sort, and if the tire was worn out as well, there would be no reason to remove it. After all, the drivers that all those Boxpok main drivers replaced had to go somewhere. I don't think the one in the photo was from a scrapped locomotive (well at least the driver didn't come from the scrap yard) because it has been pressed off the axle, whereas the scrapper would have just torched the axle off.

Several years ago (well, getting' on many years ago) the Wisconsin Central Ltd. shop at North Fond du Lac had a driver center on display by the roundhouse foremen's office. Seems they were doing some excavating for a water line break, and found it buried in the roadway where someone had put it years before to fill a pothole.

The supply of extra locomotive driving wheels went up rather sharply back in the 1980's when Northwestern Steel and Wire cut up several surplus GTW 0-8-0's. There's one set up as a monument in the GTW junction town of Durand, Michigan, accompanied by a nice statue of an engineman oiling around. I think I recall one in Bellevue, Ohio, too, and perhaps there are 6 others.

The oddest individual-parts monument I've seen is two Sharon couplers shaking hands in Galesburg, Illinois.