Shipping Locomotives is not something you do with United Parcel Service!

I was reading the summer issue of the Railway Museum Quarterly and see tha the Museum of Transport in St Louis is sending their Italian State Railways # E550.225 to the Piedmontese railway Museum in Italy?

How des one do that? I would guess a barge to New Orleans and a container ship to Italy?

Or an East Coast port by train and a container ship across the Atlantic?

Your thoughts please!

Ted Miles

The kind folks in Oporto boxed up # 249 using tongue-in-groove wood for sure-weatherproofing on the trolley's trans-Atlantic crossing.

Sloan

http://www.rockhilltrolley.org/roster/249.htm

I don't know any details of this direction but when it came to MOT it was moved as deck cargo on a ship to New Orleans and then on a flatcar to the museum. I suspect something like that this time, crane on to a flatcar to a port, then on a ship.

I beg to differ with you. I believe UPS has handled the John Bull for the Smithsonian and that they acted as the contractor to airfreight a new GMD unit overseas to meet a very tight deadline.

GME

EMD here in London, Ontario ships their locomotives to the overseas markets by rail to the east coast, then they are placed on a ship. However, one Irish Railways locomotive they built about 15 years ago was flown to Ireland. They transported it about 3 miles by road on a multi-wheel rig from the manufacturing plant to the airport. It was then loaded on a huge Russian cargo plane and flown to Ireland. I saw this move in person, but I know I saw a photo on the net of it being load on the plane just recently. But do you think I can find that photo again???? No! :P

Here's a photo of Irish Rail #201 at London ON being loaded aboard a Russian Aircraft.
http://www.historyofaircargo.com/i-Trai ... takes.html
Dan Rohrback

Some of the best museums I used to visit 10 years back. National Museum of Transportation at St. Louis is a showcase of old railway systems.

Good to see they found someone who wants it.
I could never figure out how they wound up with it in the first place and I'm sure the open track space will be welcome.
Rumor floating around 20 years ago was that they were trying to interest someone on "The Hill" to use it as a display in that Italian neighborhood.

Wasatch has and continues to ship locomotives in all sorts of ways. This month we will be moving a steam locomotive from the Grand Canyon Railway to the Pacific Northwest via flat car and truck in pieces and assembled on location.

We have also shipped entire locomotives to and from our shops to outlying countries and states via barge and semi truck.

The easiest way we have found to do this is on a shipping container "flat". This is basically a steel bed that we can weld rail to (or at least enough for the locomotive to sit on) and then the flat has all types of lading strap securments on the deck that you tie down to. The deck is a "top load" and they can put it on the very top of a stack of containers, or, in most cases, they allocate a spot on the ship for containers that are dimensional.

We have also shipped boilers in containers that have doors and walls but no top on the container. This allows for top loading and helps to protect the sides of the unit installed. These are hard to tied down to as they do not have as many spots to to tie down to inside of a container.

Believe it or not, a locomotive on a flat container can be picked up and moved by forklift at the loading docks and is the easiest way to move one about.

Customs is always an issue. Industrial items like this are heavily taxed and take some time to move through the process. We have found that alerting the docks to the arrival and the dimensions and the specifics can speed the process and we normally do this weeks or even months before we ship so we can solve questions ahead of time. Time at a dock is NOT free. If you get hung up at dock....you pay for it!

Hope this helps....

JohnE.

A few years ago a British 4-6-0 that had been relocated during preservation to Australia was returned to England. It moved (by trailer or skid?) on a ro-ro (roll-on, roll-off) ship that continuously circumnavigated the earth.

The locomotive had been in Australia just short of 25 years. If it had been in Australia for 25 or more years, it would have been considered a national artifact and restricted from export.

This sounds like GWR 4079, Pendennis Castle (Swindon, 1924), which spent 1977-2000 on the lines of Hammersley Iron, in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Pendennis Castle is now at the Didcot Railway Centre, back home on the GWR in the UK.

https://didcotrailwaycentre.org.uk/arti ... nis-castle

Phil Mulligan

Just look into the movement of the British A4 Pacifics from the Green Bay and Canadian Railway Museums to York for the gathering of all the existing A4s, in 2012-13.
Once the hoopla (and begging to allow them to stay in the UK permanently was met with a collective, "nope") was over, the covered engines were sent to Port of Liverpool where they were loaded aboard the Atlantic Concert for the voyage to Halifax. They were then unloaded there and transferred to flat cars to be taken by rail to their respective museums.
I'm sure there's video of that online.

Alaska Railroad #557 is shown upon arrival on a sea going barge in Whittier, Alaska on December 30, 2011 and in the Whittier yards. She was placed on the flat car near Moses Lake, Washington, got her cocoon at the port in Washington, moved from Whittier to Anchorage on a flat car and was removed from the flat car in Anchorage. The final 50 miles of her journey were by truck. This was her third sea cruse. She originally arrived on a Liberty ship at the port of Whittier port in 1944 and went south through the same port in 1965. The move was courtesy of Lynden Transport and the Alaska Railroad Corporation. Weight of the locomotive is about 145,000 pounds.

The Alberta Railway Museum's ex-CN 4-6-0 1392 was moved by truck from northeast Edmonton to Stettler, AB, and back again in 2017. Distance was approximately 200 km (125 miles) one way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSfJLC8mwwU