This is for fiction, so details can be altered; I want to get a minor detail right.
In steam-scrapping days, if an engine was white-lined, but usable (however shakily), it couldn't be moved under its own power...could it? If so, would painting out the obvious parts of the white line be enough to make it marginally legal to move the engine off the property toward a scrapper?

From my understanding, if a locomotive was "white lined" is was usually disabled in some manner ( removing a piston rod, for example. ) However, there is notihing to day that little detail was "forgotten" by the roundhouse foreman....

I'm not sure about the term white lined and it's use. The Frisco had a term they used when an engine was stored serviceable. They said it was in "White Lead".

I always knew white lining as meaning "off the roster". Now Pennsy had some locomotives which were officially retired, stripped of their number plates, and returned to emergency duty. Whether they were white lined or not, I don't know. It's also interesting to see how many railroads took the time to properly remove the main rods and store them on the locomotive, while others simply torched the piston rods.

The other sub-subject, is how long these massive strings of large steam locomotives stood around, waiting to be cut up. Ron Ziel's "Twilight of Steam" shows strings of Burlington locomotives, mixed with Nickle Plate Berks, and GTW power, at Sterling, Illinois, for years.

Fascinating subject for expanded discussions.

White-lining was done not only on locomotives, but on many freight and passenger cars, once they had been sold to a scrapper (or other entity not the owning railroad). In some but not all cases, the railroad name was painted out as well. Pics of some B&M early EMC diesel switchers at scrapyard in Boston show the railroad's square herald painted out as a fresh black block. Numerous photos of old heavyweight Pullmans show the car name whitelined.

If the car or loco was sold to another railroad or private owner, it got a new lease on life, white line or not.

The loco or car could certainly be moved (loco as "dead-in-tow") to a scrapper or any other place.

In the case of locomotives, the old ICC steam inspection forms required a "final report" that would state "engine 1234 has been retired and will not be used again by this company". So, once the XY&Z Railroad sold eng. 1234 to the Acme Scrap and Rendering Co., and the final ICC report was filed, the XY&Z couldn't fire up ol' 1234 even for an emergency, without restoring it to the active roster and filing the necessary paperwork with the ICC Bureau of Locomotive Inspection.

Hope this helps, let us know when your book/article/story is released!

Howard P.

Thank you all. If the final report hadn't been filed, then, she should be ...I was abot to say "good to go" but "good" isn't a word one would associate with her at the time.

Picture a hulking articulated toward the end of steam. Most of the others have already been sent off to one place or another, but she'd been in a wreck and no one thought to put her on the death train with them. Big shots were coming to look around the yards soon, and the B&O (by whatever pseudonym it has to be known) yardmaster, in his zeal to clean the place up, noticed the engine the shop crew had hoped he wouldn't. A trainload of scrap happened to be leaving for another mill in the opposite direction, but power was short at the moment, so they fired her up and she drew the dubious honor of limping off with no herald, a scavenged bell (even in relatively lax late '50s days, I don't think she could operate without one of some kind) and a tender that was itself ready for scrap.
Ideally, I can have the crew aboard leave her in the JB&S yard for them to haul the scrap to the mill (it's on JB&S lines and the B&O doesn't run through.) When they don't take the locomotive with them, the old roadmaster will ask them why, and they'll explain that she's part of the scrap, and that's about when inspiration will strike. All I'd have to do would be have him convince the original road's yardmaster not to send in that final report until Monday, in case he can make a deal for her. Mind you, he wouldn't care if he had to do something slightly illegal or underhanded; there's an engine at stake here, and he's already all but stolen one by claiming she needed so many repairs that NYC would have had to pay more than the scrap value to get her back.

I think the key point is to look at this as a business decision. "white lining" meant important things from a tax, regulation, and book asset point of view. The mechanical condition of the locomotive was irrelevant. If the railroads could do nothing, they would. The only reason to disable a locomotive would be to provide defensive evidence of the book value of the locomotive, and to defend the lack of regulatory filings.

It is very similar to tax law. What records do you keep to defend your taxes? Opinion varies among accountants.

Actually, the reason to disable the locomotives on the scrap line is so they could be easily moved, with minimal damage. With the running gear intact, but no steam working through the cylinders, there would be no lubrication, and movement could cause damage to the cylinders. Even if there was no intention of ever running the engine again, it still needed to be able to make the trip to the scrap yard without a failure that left it stranded on the road. Early on, the main rods were typically removed and stowed on the tender, so if the engine was sold for continued use somewhere else, the parts would all be there. Toward the end I'm sure it became obvious that the engines would never run again, and then it became common to cut the piston rods as the quick and easy way to do the same thing.