Ask HN: What would you do with a 130 ton locomotive?

Caltrain (rail service provider for the San Francisco Peninsula) is selling their old 135 ton gasoline locomotives: https://www.caltrainstore.com/special-items/p/caltrain-emd-f40ph-2-locomotive-used

According to the website, the engine is disabled and you have to pick them up yourself.

I was wondering what you colud do with one of those beasts and why they are selling them. What would you buy one for? A fancy restaurant / cafe perhaps? This of course supposing that the pavement could handle such weight.

With enough land and disposable income you could build a 1:1 scale model railroad.

There's actually numerous small regional freight railways, again. They're hungry for gear and bodging together all sorts of antiques to make stuff run, I gather.

The private collectors of rail stock still exist, but they're getting less common.

The weight is actually easy to deal with: you put the car on a section of rail. This spreads the load over a wide area just as happens when they're in use.

Sell it for scrap and use the money to travel.

130 tons is a hefty millstone indeed.

>What a dumb requirement. It's like the cash-for-clunkers program requiring the engines to be destroyed.

The whole point of the "cash-for-clunkers" program was to remove as many older, more polluting, and unsafe, cars from the market as possible, to force an upgrade of the fleet, and simultaneously provide incentives to buy new cars.

It wasn't dumb in the larger scheme, but yes... on the individual level, it made it almost impossible to get an affordable good used car for a few years.

The locomotive is now only good for scrap metal, if the engine is similarly disabled.