And, with the patterns and tooling already built for Jupiter and 119, creating a good replica locomotive suitable for the era would not be too difficult. there are sources for car hardware as well, thanks to Randy and Co.

dave

None of this shocks me. I've been doing historical re-enacting for almost all my life, done every time period you can with guns. I've seen every unsafe thing you can imagine, everything from ramrods being fired to explosives planted right where people are walking. Even had some wadding fired from a cannon right at us, burying itself almost two feet in the ground, less than 10 feet away from a person!
I am also a Cowboy Action Shooter and love doing that. Last summer, I volunteered for one of these robbery events at another location, as I had a full 1880s outfit and matched set of six shooters. I bought factory blanks with half-powered loads. As I've been handling weapons for the Army and as a hobby for many years, I have a decent sense of safety. However, the people I was doing the event with did NOT. Only myself and two others were armed. The guy playing the "Sherriff" role as fine, also shooting factory loaded blanks at a distance from a horse. I shot my pistol only once in the air as the locomotive went past and then at the Sherriff (facing away from the train) at the end of the event. What horrified me was the guy shooting a shotgun of questionable mechanical reliability, shooting dog training blanks. He'd left the shotgun propped up against a tree afterwards, and I opened it up and found a unfired blank still in there. Could you imagine what would have happened if a kid had grabbed that? I think the RR that put this on got another group to put on the event this year, though. Their website showed a totally different group who's outfits and guns suggested they also might be cowboy shooters. Heck, that sounds like the core of the problem in this case. The core of the problem in the case in this news story appears to be people transitioning from live ammunition to blanks. When going from one to the other, you always run these risks, especially when the firearms don't need any kind of conversions to fire blanks (like barrel restrictors for semi-auto weapons or machine guns).
Still, I trust nobody when it comes to these things. I'll never do another such event unless there's a safety inspection that meets my personal standards (which are pretty darned strict).

None of this shocks me. I've been doing historical re-enacting for almost all my life, done every time period you can with guns. I've seen every unsafe thing you can imagine, everything from ramrods being fired to explosives planted right where people are walking. Even had some wadding fired from a cannon right at us, burying itself almost two feet in the ground, less than 10 feet away from a person!
I am also a Cowboy Action Shooter and love doing that. Last summer, I volunteered for one of these robbery events at another location, as I had a full 1880s outfit and matched set of six shooters. I bought factory blanks with half-powered loads. As I've been handling weapons for the Army and as a hobby for many years, I have a decent sense of safety. However, the people I was doing the event with did NOT. Only myself and two others were armed. The guy playing the "Sherriff" role as fine, also shooting factory loaded blanks at a distance from a horse. I shot my pistol only once in the air as the locomotive went past and then at the Sherriff (facing away from the train) at the end of the event. What horrified me was the guy shooting a shotgun of questionable mechanical reliability, shooting dog training blanks. He'd left the shotgun propped up against a tree afterwards, and I opened it up and found a unfired blank still in there. Could you imagine what would have happened if a kid had grabbed that? I think the RR that put this on got another group to put on the event this year, though. Their website showed a totally different group who's outfits and guns suggested they also might be cowboy shooters. Heck, that sounds like the core of the problem in this case. The core of the problem in the case in this news story appears to be people transitioning from live ammunition to blanks. When going from one to the other, you always run these risks, especially when the firearms don't need any kind of conversions to fire blanks (like barrel restrictors for semi-auto weapons or machine guns).
Still, I trust nobody when it comes to these things. I'll never do another such event unless there's a safety inspection that meets my personal standards (which are pretty darned strict).

Although firearms, even loaded with blanks, are serious business, I can't help thinking about a "field piece" (cannon) that one "Wild West" troupe hauled to shows behind a pickup truck. One one side was the license plate, on the other was a sign that read:
"If you can read this, you're in range!"

Yeah. We could have Judge Doom come and threaten to close the trolley museum... that'd go over especially well at OERM...