BATTLE CREEK, Mich. –
The nonprofit organization Railroading Heritage of Midwest America recently acquired a diesel switcher locomotive donation through Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services from the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky.
The Silvis, Illinois-based RRHMA was founded in 1991 and promotes the history of railroading in the Midwest by preserving, restoring, operating, and interpreting historic locomotives and rail cars.
To move the 80-ton engine to its Illinois facility, RRHMA said they rented a 220-ton crane to load it. Due to weight restrictions, the locomotive was disassembled and loaded onto three semi-trucks, with the heaviest section weighing 56 tons.
The acquisition was led by Dennis Daugherty, a volunteer with RRHMA who has more than 45 years of experience in railroading.
“I was drafted into the U.S. Army August 1966 to August 1968,” Daugherty said. Before being drafted, he was an apprentice diesel locomotive machinist with a major railroad.
The Army assigned him the Military Occupational Specialty of diesel locomotive repairman and machinist. His orders took him to Fort Eustis, Virginia, which he said was then home to the only active military railroad battalion, the 714th. Later, he was stationed in Korea and ended up as a machinist in an ordnance company.
After the Army, he went to work for what he called the “big railroads.” But it wasn’t long before he discovered railroad museums focused on preserving the history of steam engines.
“I’ve been all over the United States doing this,” Daugherty said. “I have gone to England, and I’ve been to Africa and South America chasing trains – steam engines mostly. You know, steam is my thing.”
Daugherty has also worked for railroad museums in Michigan and California.
While working in Michigan, he said he used DLA Disposition Services to acquire everything for the museum’s machine shop. Later, while in charge of the California State Railroad Museum’s shop in Sacramento, he again turned to DLA Disposition Services to acquire locomotives, machine tools, and forklifts.
Now retired, he is volunteering with RRHMA to help establish a new facility in Illinois.
“We’re setting up a machine shop, and you know we needed everything,” Daugherty said. “We had a big empty building with overhead cranes, basically. In order to do railroad work, you need a lot of stuff: forklifts and machine tools and everything else you can think of.”
Just as before, Daugherty said he plans to continue to rely on DLA Disposition Services to equip the new machine shop.
“I know the surplus system because I’ve been doing it so long,” he said.