Just found this article on the Strasburg Railroad Facebook page regarding Engine #39. It states that Juniata Shops produced 6700 G5 Class locomotives and it got me thinking...since the inception of steam locomotives and then electric and diesel, whatever became of all that scrap metal, appliances, wheels, prime movers, alternators, chassis, compressors...everything!? Did any of it make it into peoples private collections or remanufactured into something else?
I remember reading about flight 401 that went down in The Everglades and as the fuselage was cut of for scrap, pieces of that plane ended up as household appliances. Somewhere out there people had refrigerators with an Eastern Airlines strip across the door, I imagined.
Would someone out there possibly still have remnants of the countless thousands upon thousands of locomotives that were built, ran an eventually scrapped? An air pump from a C&O 4-8-4 would make a great conversation piece so would a traction motor from a DD40XA!!

Read more carefully.

The release states that 6,700 steam locomotives, total, were built at Juniata/Altoona over the lengthy course of its existence, not 6,700 G5 class 4-6-0's.

In addition, a few electrics were built at Altoona (a few of which were never put into service), a handful of internal-cumbustion switchers, and a few modern diesels in the Conrail/NS era assembled from "kits" supplied by EMD/GE.

if there was enough railfans in the early days knowing that steam would cease to exist, maybe they would have been more valued to pick pieces off.

As Gary Grey pointed out the old scrap yard where the steam crane was had wheels from the old N&W Jackshafts, but nobody went to pick them out, I didnt know they were there.

There may be some hidden gems yet out there we don't know.
But as you know the railroads had hundreds of steam engines, when a newer more modern steam came along, the older ones selectively scrapped some saved for further life re-assigned to other duties. One Hollywood movie featured 2 real steamers crashing headon into each other, why not, they were about to be scrapped anyways, the last yeehaw for the engines.

To answer the poster's question, yes, people have saved things from scrapped locomotives but mostly smaller items like whistles, bells, and builders plates.

Certainly in the diesel era, old locomotives are sometimes parted out with engines or components thereof, trucks, motors, and so forth being retained or resold to keep other locomotives going. It depends whether there is demand for the parts and who is doing the scrapping.

What is left gets broken up and becomes scrap steel which is a major source of new steel. It gets melted down and eventually becomes steel in the many forms that new steel is made and sold.

Direct re-use like the idea of a strip of jet aircraft fuselage sheet metal being someone's refrigerator door? No, not directly like that. Leaving aside the matter of aircraft being mostly aluminum alloy while fridge doors tend to be steel, it would not be directly reused like that. It gets melted down and turned into new steel...rails, bars, plates, girders, coils of sheet steel, etc. You would never know where it came from. There are probably diesel locomotives that contain steel that was once a steam locomotive that was scrapped and melted down. No way to know.

Steve