In 2007, the four passenger cars at the Louisiana Arts and Science Museum in downtown Baton Rouge were moved to new locations. The museum didn't want them anymore. IC diner 4112 went to the Monticello Railroad Museum in Illinois on its own wheels and they paid for that.

IC RPO 95(blt 1914, 128,000 lbs), Southern day coach 1064(blt 1925, 161,000 lbs), and IC office car 4(blt by Jackson & Sharpe in 1883, 175,000 lbs) were moved to a display in Hammond, LA, 40 miles away.

In a discussion on another internet group, it was brought up that the move from Baton Rouge to Hammond cost about $450,000, and preparation work in Hammond to display them was another $140,000. Thats almost $200,000 per car. It would be even more if you added in the things that were donated.

They cut the sheet metal connecting the cars where the diaphrams had once been, and removed all conduit and air conditioning piping from underneath the cars. They ordered three special flat cars from CN.

They rented(or contracted for) a 180 ton crane and a 200 ton crane, plus a 14 axle transporter. Over two days they lifted the cars and transported them to the CN yard. They put spool jacks under the cars and lowered the transport at the yard so the cranes could stay at the museum until all the cars were lifted and moved to the yard. Later the second day, the cranes went to the yard to lift the cars onto the flat cars. They then spent several days welding the pedestals that supported the passenger cars to the flat cars, and attaching chains to tie down the cars to prevent them from shifting.

CN ran a special train to transport the three cars to Hammond.

The cranes came with a 30 man crew. They had to buy chains and steel beams to make the pedestals. They had to rent a fork lift and a welding machine. There were four lifts per car, they had the cranes for 4 days. They were not charged overtime for it being a weekend. They were required to have insurance by the city of Baton Rouge and the museum before they could work on the cars. They were required to have insurance on the cars to move them by rail. They had to pay demurrage for 12 days on the flat cars(X 3). They paid for a special train move. They were not charged for permits, police escort, or public works dealing with the traffic lights.

In Hammond, they had to do a survey of the site, and build two tracks, one 200' and one 100'. Two dozer crews removed top soil down to clay, moving 600 yards of dirt($12,000). They layed fabric, brought in 800 yards of crushed concrete, and then 100 yards of crushed white rock(site work now at $50,000). The rails and ties were donated. The CN arranged for one of its contractors to do the track work. That costs another $30,000(over half the actual cost was donated).

After the cars were moved, they installed fencing, night lighting, and water.

Am I just living in an earlier time, or is this what it costs to move a railroad car 40 miles.

This preservation stuff is an expensive proposition. Do you have any more information on or photos of the Jackson and Sharp car? I am tracking equipment built by J&S.

Thanks,

I think I'm pretty safe in stating that Will Harris could have moved them cheaper. From what I understand, the entire bill for the "Lost Engines" rescue (8 pieces of equipment involved) including site work in Portsmouth and cosmetic work on 1134, will come in around $250,000. Will moved two lightweight ex-C&O cars over 100 miles last week for the Buckingham Branch RR.

"two cranes...30 man crew....specialized blocking fabricated on site....... Be amazed that it didn't cost more.

This is what happens when you have (too much?) money to throw at the problem. The rest of us would have used other mechanisms to make the move (probably all highway). An interesting comparison would be when the RMNE (???) moved a small fleet (four?) from a private collection to thier museum (all highway move).

I have a friend who was involved at Seashore in the early days, and equipment moving (for them) was a very interesting and low budget affair in comparison to what we deal with now.

Michael Seitz
Missoula MT

It was easy to get away with a lot of things 30 or 40 years ago, before this country became overpopulated with litigious people. I've participated in several moves of trolley and railroad equipment that would cause a heart attack today, including one in which we welded a failing trailer to the carbody to make it home. I was on another move where the owner of the trucking company led a convoy through the business district of a major city on a weekday afternoon, passing $20 bills out the window to every cop we encountered. Nowadays, the first question asked is whether there is insurance, and the next question is whether all permits are in order.

Railroad officials, and railroaders themselves, were a bit more willing to stick their necks out for a museum years ago. Officials looked the other way, and railroaders would do a favor for no more than a box of doughnuts. Doesn't happen that way anymore.

You mean "a box of cigars." That was the "standard" price of a steam whistle at a scrapyard for years in the 1940s and 1950s.

Though of late, the doughnuts are probably as "politically incorrect" as the cigars today........

I saw this with my own eyes in 1989-90 There was a house mover in west Texas that bought some BN steel cabooses to resell. To move them he chained a set of old semi axels under one end and wrapped the cable from his boom truck around the coupler at the other end. He had tried to turn too sharp in a parking lot and had to lift the wheeled end and rechain the axels as they had twisted off center. He left before we did and was doing 50 mph with that rig when we passed him. Remember that caboose was swinging on a cable!

Well if it's somebody else's waste of money, who cares. Better they throw too much money at the problem than too little, cheap out and botch the job.

When shopping for a railcar mover, newbies tend to pick "local". That is wrong. Experience will cause your piece to arrive at your destination not broken.

To fully illustrate the depth of my meaning when I say "choose experience over local", here is the preferred vendor for most California trolley groups. http://silkroadtrans.com/ Notice they are in New York.

In 1991, RMNE moved four Pullman heavyweight cars from a backyard in Stonington, CT to a rail siding 7 miles away in Mystic. The cars (plus 2 others) had been collected and moved onto the site in 1962-64 by Jim Bradley. His heir and nephew, David Bradley, gave RMNE four of the cars, sold us one and sold the sixth car to Valley Railroad.

Five of the six were moved off the site in a 5-day project starting the Monday of the first week of April 1991. A crane and rigging company from Boston, Shaughnessy, was used and Silk Road did the actual over-the-road moving using custom-built steerable dollies.

Before that April week, RMNE had 47 working days of pre-move prep to do on the cars. 27 years on-site, along with an attitude of "Cut it off, they will never see rails again" when the cars moved in, had to be rectified. Wheel sets, brake valves four coupler and draft gear assemblies, new hand brakes, you name it-- all had to be put right before the move, so that once the cars hit the rails in Mystic, they would be ready for movement.

This job also included building a 300-ft gravel road because the original way into the property was now blocked.

A lot of complex logistics, and lots of pre-move prep. We moved an average of one car each day. The final car was given by RMNE to a private collector and was moved a few months later by him.

The whole thing cost RMNE about $70,000. I do not know about VRR's cost for their one car. The rail move was extra, but was not excessive. It was a special move, a work train engine and crew, late at night on a weekend. This is the Northeast Corridor, after all.

RMNE has also moved about 15-18 freight cars by road in the last 6 years. They averaged about $2000 each.

To me, the $250,000 number seems a bit excessive. The area we operate in, the New York-Connecticut-Southern Massachusetts area, is one of the most expensive places in the country to do this sort of thing. I can't imagine Louisiana is costlier....

Howard P.
Pullman Cars All Over The Highway in
Mystic, CT

the Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum moved a wooden passenger car from the remains after a fire of the Yankee Silversmith restaurant about a year or so ago. The trucker was stopped at least twice for not having the right permits.

It made the news all over the Internet at the time. I understand the car finially make it to the museum. If memory served it was a wooden Boston and Maine car. They use a sister car as a birthday car or something like that at the Connecticut Trolley Museum.

The Western Railway Museum had Silk Road move an LRV fior us a while back and has been stated they were most compitent even though they were made to take the car by way of San Jose instead of the Bay Bridge.

Silk road has an interesting web site; worth a look if you have a couple of minuites for the Internet.

After moveing most if not all of those Cleveland auction cars far and wide. I guess they are going to have an extra dividend this year!

Ted Miles

Obviously the Bay Bridge couldn't possibly handle the weight of a train... :) :) (note date)

I wonder how they got it across the Sacramento River... did they find a tolerant bridge, or did they go via Sacramento?

The reason railcars moved out of San Francisco go by way of San Jose is a low overpass east of the Bay Bridge on I-80. From San Jose to Fairfield high loads are routed up I-680. It is a newer freeway and does not have the clearance issues that I-80 does.

This is about how Northern Ohio Rwy. Museum has had cars moved from Cleveland. Their local haulier is also a heavy duty tractor trailer towing company. At the moment, towed loads don't need Ohio state permits. He remembered this by accident when he got into trouble near the end of a move. He detached the tractor, lifted one end of the load with the hook and cable from his heavy duty wrecker truck, and was suddenly free of the local yokel's authority. Where appropriate, other purchases have been moved this way.

No, you are not out of touch. I would say that is an obscene amount of money to pay to move 4 passenger cars 40 miles. I have moved seven 85' long passenger cars in the last 12 years or so from isolated track back to live rail. Four of those involved highway moves of at least 150 miles. Six of the moves occured in California, which presumably would be somewhat more expensive than some other states. Three of the moves originated in remote locations where the heavy haul outfit had a long deadhead move to the point of origin. I always try to use 1 crane if possible, but at times 2 are needed. I have never had more than 1 crane operator and 1 rigger per crane, plus usually just 1 helper (me) for the misc. stuff. With 1 crane to load and 1 to unload, I can usually get the car back on live rail for a total cost of less than $10,000.00. Last year, I moved a car from Northern CA to Southern CA by highway - a distance of about 500 miles - and because of the extra distance, the total cost of the move, including 1 crane at each and, was about $16,000.00. Not chump change, but certainly not $112,500.00 per car as noted in your post. I did it that way because it made no sense to go a lesser distance to the nearest railhead, take at least several weeks, if not months, to prep the car for a rail move, pay the rail shipping cost, and risk damage going over the hump at Roseville or West Colton. Once the car was on the dolly wheels, it was much quicker, easier, and yes cheaper to just highball down Interstate 5 for LA.

I also don't understand why they would have gone to all that extra trouble (and considerable expense) to move those cars in Louisiana 40 miles by rail. Once a passenger car is craned onto dolly wheels to go down the highway, the cost to go 1 mile or 100 miles is negligable. And, if you put a passenger car on a railroad flat car, you will definitely need 2 cranes to load and 2 to unload, which of course roughly doubles the crane cost.

I have never used house movers to lift a car because they have always bid the jobs much higher than the crane companies.

Either way, it sounds to me like these people got taken for a financial ride big-time.

From my experiences with McHugh Bros. Heavy Hauling's rail car moves, the 30 person crane crew sounds very excessive, even if they also did all the rigging , fork lifting, welding, etc. Even if help must be hired for those tasks, why pay crane people rates, and pay for the cranes while the crew does other work? As for special railroad trains, many large railroads seem to price the extra charge for a special train on what the locomotive and crew could gross if they were handling a full length main line train of loaded cars! Yet they still reserve the right to do the move at their convenience and with other revenue cars in the train for no discount.