If anybody ever conjures up a brand new standard gauge locomotive, I suspect it will be a whole lot like a Baldwin Catalog 55 ton prairie with 48" drivers. But I ain't even holding my breath for that. Seems the British are really on to something with the nominal two foot narrow guage railways of Wales and the colonies. Seems quite a bit of that kind of stuff is available off the shelf.

In the steam tractor world, in the last ten years or so, there are starting to be a lot of reboilered engines, and some that are basically complete replicas. There's a guy in California that started with the crankshaft out of an early Holt Steam Crawler, and built the rest of the tractor around it. These are being done because the componants are manageable. These little narrow guage engines aren't any bigger than a lot of US steam tractors, and the prices to build are real similar. And, perhaps just as important, you can lay the narrow gauge just about anywhere. That is what they seem to do accross the pond. In the great scheme of things, a quarry hunslet running though a garden by a lake satifies most folks as much as a New York-Chicago speed run behind a J class.

Basically, except for a few handles in the cab and the whistle, nothing is manageable on a Hudson.

Well, if the project gets off the ground and you build a boiler, I'll donate my NYC 4-6-4 smokestack to the cause. Right now it's doing duty as a planter. Nobody will steal it.