Flickr doesn't like that image being shared. That took a lot of tries.
Q: Metal, plaster, plastic, or what? And how much were they asking?
I'm a little shocked that a Chinese foundry would make such a small run (or that the Museum would order a big enough run to be worth sending it to China).
I've personally done this type of foundry work, and indeed we still do such work at a couple rail museum shops with which I work. But we're doing it in either museum shops on a volunteer basis, or we're doing it at vocational training schools. My sincere guess is that the kind of "nasty" grunt work and the shops involved, on a commercial basis, has gone the way of old-fashioned playground equipment at schools, for the same reasons as everything else--OSHA, EPA, etc. I've cast replica plates with type metal used in Linotype machines, simply because it melted so fast, I could get it cheap, and the low melting point sped up my production--I hate to think what the EPA thinks of a mix of lead, tin, antimony, and zinc hanging in public.....
Throw that aside, get a modern shop in your area to crank out a commercial stack of good-looking plates like this, and then tell me what the unit cost is. I'd sincerely love to hear it, and the reaction of the gift shop manager at the price he'd have to charge and how many will actually sell at that price. Any discussion of US-versus-Chinese work conditions, wages, work quality, etc. becomes econo-political discussion of the sort we try to avoid in this forum...
Strictly an aside... but I'd be sincerely interested in hearing whether Norfolk Southern's Juniata Shops (basically within sight of the Museum) is 1) physically capable of such casting anymore, and 2) whether they'd do such a small job for the Museum. Imagine how fast those plates would sell, even at an inflated $250 or whatever price, if they came with a certificate and cast mark proving they were actually made in Altoona at a railroad shop!