(The following story by Jeff Sturgeon appeared on the Roanoke Times website on January 17.)
ROANOKE, Va. — Advocates who are puzzled about how to save six historic locomotives sitting in a Roanoke scrap yard include even the railroad that used to own the machines.
Some rail buffs would like to see Norfolk Southern Corp. show up with a crane and lift the old locomotives onto a flat-bed rail car. Then it would be a simple matter of motoring across downtown to drop the engines off at the Virginia Museum of Transportation, which would welcome the pieces into its collection.
But NS spokesman Robin Chapman said Wednesday that relocating the four steam and two diesel engines by rail would be more difficult than meets the eye. In fact, after studying the engines closely, NS personnel are initially stumped.
“We have looked at the feasibility of moving those old locomotives out of there and I guess the short of it is, we really have not come up with a practical way to do that,” Chapman said.
For one thing, “they’re not sitting on rails. They’re just directly on the ground. So that’s a complication. The other is, we don’t know how much they weigh, which makes it difficult to evaluate how much it would take to move them,” Chapman explained.
One possibility considered was placing sections of track underneath the engines and dragging them out. But in spite of considerable brainstorming, no good plan has emerged.
However it would be done, it will cost a lot of money, Chapman added.
“It’s not impossible but there are practical considerations that we just haven’t been able to get past,” he said.
Chapman said while the railroad supports the general aim of railroad buffs who hope to save the engines, the railroad is not investing any energy in the issue right now.
That said, the locomotives are not in the way of railroad operations. So there is no urgency to move them from the railroad’s perspective.
Virginia Scrap Iron & Metal Co., which owns the engines and on whose land they sit, is winding down operations and preparing to sell the property.
The Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority is considering whether it will purchase the spot. The authority has not released any information about what it would do with the engines, if anything.
The transportation museum said it doesn’t have the money to recover or refurbish the engines, an amount that could fall between $250,000 and $500,000.
Donnie Eakin, president of D.E. Eakin & Sons, a Roanoke lead-abatement contractor, said he would charge $40,000 to $50,000 per engine to trim away vegetation to expose the engines, sandblast them to remove hazardous lead paint and authentically repaint them.
“I can make those trains look like whatever they looked like when they were brand-new,” said Eakin, who added that the firm has remediated and repainted seven other engines at the transportation museum.
And if it ever came to it, a metal recycler could cut up the engines with a blowtorch and haul them away in pieces to be made into new steel, confirmed Jay Brenner, president of Cycle Systems.
Brenner, who sits on the transportation museum board, said his and his company’s preference is to preserve the engines.
“There wouldn’t be anything left once we got done with them,” he said.