I just got word from Bill Wall that after successfully completing the liquidation of the Trolleyville collection that he has been asked to take on a more daunting task. He is going to be helping to liquidate a museums collection of over 500 pcs of rolling stock including steam, diesel, interurban and streetcars. Seems this group over extended themselves in recent aquisitions and the collection has been seized for failure to payback outstanding dedt.

Bill plans on undertaking this task once he completes the sale of a bridge in Brooklyn.

Despite the date, that remark is probably true, as the transit authority he works for needs money to pay for service cuts!

Do you have any idea what museum is going to be liquidated?

From the number of cars they're selling off, it's difficult to guess which museum it might be.

I know equipment has already started to be sold off to collectors. Dean Kamen, inventer of the Segway, just bought their 0-2-0T steam engine.

And Springfield just took an option on their MONORAIL!, beating out Shelbyville.......

Well no need for the smart-*** replys, it was just a question.

Aaron, Don't get offended, just look at the date of the original post. It is an ancient and honored tradition here at RYPN to shovel on the BS as thick as possible on April 1. The moderators even warn you to not take anything that is posted on that day seriously. We "gotcha" this year, but you'll be an old veteran here next year. We will expect you to join in then with a suitable and semi-plausible but amusing load of horse-hockey.

Regards,

Darn...I was trying so hard not to get fooled. Oh well, cant wait till next year! =P

Actually, scarily enough, there WAS a two-wheeled automobile based on the "Foomobile" fire truck of the comic strip "Smokey Stover":

http://www.schlattersinc.com/foo_mobile.shtml

Yes, it does/did run and drive.

So check out whoever has this now, and see if they also got the 0-2-0T.

There was an 0-3-0, in fact, two of them. They was built by Orenstein & Koppel for the Patalia State Monorail Tramway in India. The Tramway is a single rail laid next to an existing roadway; a wagon wheel held up one side of the locomotives, and ran on the roadway.

One is preserved in working order in the National Railway Museum in New Delhi, India. The other one was last recorded stored in a railway shop in Patalia.





One thing I have learned in my years of documenting steam engines is that just about anything you can think of, someone somewhere has tried it out.

Would it be an 0-3-0, or a 1-1-1? I can imagine a US trucker seeing such a contraption and calling out on the CB, "Mercy Sakes Alive, Good Buddies! There's a dadburn choo-choo a-coming down the other side of the road!" Or one could call it the illegitimate offspring of a steam tractor and the Epsom Salts Monorail of Death Valley. And thanks for posting the photo. There a lots of strange mechanical contrivances that never got off the drawing board, but this one made it into the real world.

Rather than the Epsom Salts, a better monorail parent would be the Sonoma Valley Prismoidal (its steam locomotive ended up as a laundry boiler..)

That is the first I have heard of a relic of the Prismoidal surviving some years. What happened to this laundry? (It conjures an image of the Fiddletown and Copperopolis cartoon series).

Here is a prismoidal locomotive probably similar to one on the Sonoma line.

http://www.sonomavalleywiki.info/Sonoma_Valley_Prismoidal_Railway

I don't know - there was an article in the Marin Independent-Journal many years ago which said that the locomotive became a laundry boiler, but I don't have a good reference to it.

And here is an honest-to-god 0-2-0 monorail steam locomotive. I noticed the air pump is a Worthington-Simpson duplex water pump with the pump cylinders removed, and air cylinders put in their place.



http://dave-mills.yolasite.com/steam-monorail.php