Hi all,
With all of the scrappings of passenger equipment over the last few years I've been thinking about an adoption list for so to speak. Cars can be for sale or looking donate, it doesn't really matter. What does matter is creating a list here and connecting current owners with future ones, private and museums alike. Post as much info as you can especially last operating year if known, contact and pictures.
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Here's a sample:

Wallahasnot, PA
1928 PRR Day Coach ($5000, may donate)
Car has some sill rot and missing some windows but good roof and floors appear good. Townshipwants owner to make it disapear. He would hate to scrap it. Car was used on locar trains to East Jabip and was retired in 1952 when service ended. Car is 80' and weighs 700,000 lbs. Cannot be shipped by rail, landlocked. Trucking should be easy.

Contact
Bradley La Fermintation
(610) 555-5555

"555" yeah that seems like a real number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_%28telephone_number%29

Here's a general problem with this kind of thing.

While such a "list" may well bring out "unknown" cars that have been little reported or documented, my own personal experience is that for every car that will get "saved" this way, there will be three or four that will end up simply becoming someone else's "albatross."

If you don't care, and you simply want the car gone, it doesn't matter much, except for the bozos who give up halfway through the scrapping process and leave a half-chopped pile of steel, wood, concrete, and asbestos in your back lot.

But most car owners want to see the car saved somehow, and that requires "vetting" of prospective purchasers. Others would call it "profiling" or "discrimination." If this half-restored Pullman is in your back lot, you'd prefer it go to a museum or operating group that at least appears dedicated and experienced with this kind of thing, not to some Vegas or Bramson casino to hang from the ceiling or some guy that wants a "playhouse" for the grandkids.

Those "in the know" are going to network with the TRAIN/ARM crowd and in the RyPN classifieds. The clueless heirs of a car in the "back 40" are still going to go to eBay and Craigslist, no matter how hard we preservationists promote a list.

Recently, a microbrewery was sold in my area. The sellers called down the list of bidders, many with odd names and Asian-sounding accents, until they found the first bidder that actually wanted a brewery for brewing, and not a pile of food-grade stainless steel scrap. It only took 2-3 questions of the purchasers to figure out "Yeah, we're currently cooking on a seven-barrel Austin system and wanna ramp up to a bomber bottling line, so we need the 20-barrel capacity, and we'd been looking at that NBV system, but..." rather than "Yes, yes, we want brewery very much, when we come and pick up?"

You do realize that was a sample, right?

No wonder the call wouldn't go through. I wanted to see what an 80' car that weighed that much looks like:~)

Well, let's get serious about this then:

http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=33244

Matt G.