The recovered railroad material post and how it branched off into the kind of stuff people collect and call railroadiana brings a question to mind, What is the most stupid or crapiest item that people have seen sold as railroadiana at either shows or online For me it was at a now defunct railroadiana show in California some clown had an orange beaten up MOW truck door complete with a smashed window although it had an SP herald on it In the morning it had a $50 price tag on it later crossed out to $25 and then $10 finally finishing up outside the door with a free sticker on it (I think it ended up in the dumpster) The winner online was a guy who used to sell bags of ballast from "Fallen flag railroads "

Not at a railroadiana show..............

..... but when the roundhouse roof of the B&O Museum collapsed years ago, one of the items inside, part of a display on dining cars and china, was what was alleged to be the only surviving B&O-labeled/branded tea bag.

The curators reportedly had a bounty offer for that tea bag among the salvage personnel. I think it was found, but not sure what condition it was in--it's not currently on display.

Actually, that truck door would come in VERY handy for someone contemplating a restoration of a SP MOW truck. The owner of a vintage pickup truck "restored" to PRR station/freight agent's use appearance over on the Delmarva Eastern Shore also owns a real (battered) door from an original PRR truck; it was the basis for the restoration's paint and herald/lettering placement.

British Rail found that there was very little they COULDN'T sell at their "Collector's Corner" shop in Euston. Nameplates, of course, were routine, if expensive; the stuff got as bizarre as torch-cut BR double-arrow emblems and numbers off of locomotives, locomotive doors and seats, and even spares such as gauges, engine pistons, and the like.

Let's see, what's in the current auction catalogs?................

EDIT: Here are "prices realized" at recent railroadiana auctions........

http://www.maurerail.com/asp/051609PVprices.htm

http://www.maurerail.com/asp/auctionlist.asp?iano=555

Note that these auctions have a 12% buyer's premium plus state 6% sales tax.

That's odd as there was a guy selling B&O tea bags for something like $3 each at the show in Gaithersburg, MD for a number of years. I'm pretty sure they are authentic as the bags and the tea in them looked pretty funky!

In fact those teabags led me to find out that the Lackawanna served Salada Tea. We now sell Salada Tea in a nice gift tin. I was never able to find out if the DL&W had special tags like the B&O did, so we use the standard Salada tag.

I found the most ridiculous railroadiana on ebay the other day. It seems a small passenger carrier (recently switched to diesel) in the Northeast is trying to offset costs by selling large chunks of scrap iron. The chunk currently for sale, known affectionately by the shop crews as the Agiocochook, has no significant value for the railroad (or any owner) due to the inherent inefficiencies in its design and its high operational costs. The railroad is asking $100,000 for the item, but it is essentially useless to anyone but the railroad (and it seems to be useless to them as well), so it seems likely they will end up being haggled down to the scrap price of the metal, at which point a collector will abscond with the chunk of metal and place it in the signal garden in his back yard, next to an ill-begotten CP Dwarf Signal.

About 25 years ago, the Muni (which operates all transit in San Francisco) contracted the construction of a three-car "line train" for maintenance of overhead wire. Totally custom, built by a manufacturer of mine locomotives. Motorized wire coils, pneumatics and hydraulics everywhere... this thing was stacked.

Anyway, on about its third trip, doing midday maintenance in the tunnel, it derailed. This took hours to untangle, and utterly destroyed the afternoon commute. They parked it and swore "never again!"

It went up for auction. A collector bought the whole kit'n'kaboodle.