Jerry grew up next to the B&O, like me. We used to hang together - one memory that sticks out was trying to pull builder's plates off dead locomotives on the way to the furnace sitting for a while at Akron Junction. As I recall we just had vice grips - damn hard to get the plates off without damaging them.

I think the Kovalchicks might have been amenable to an offer from someone with real creds and the energy and money to do the job. Obviously that was Jerry; he was motivated even as a kid in the fifties.

Steam disappeared real fast in Northern Ohio with the recession of 1958. The B&O in the fall of 1957 and the NKP in the summer of 1958. Nothing on the Pennsy; the NYC had some older mountains(mohawks)in Cincinnati in 1958 but dead in the roundhouse.