Mine is a toss up, between a gift and an item that I found on the side of the road from where it belonged.... A few years back I found a Union Pacific control point sign for Toltec, AZ across the street from a pile of old Southern Pacific H3 signals...looking back, I wish that I would have liberated one of the signals....but I did save the sign that was on the city street in Casa Grande.... Last year, my friend Ashley gave me a number board off of a Southern Pacific SD40-T2, it was one of the Roseville Repaints...
An original Pacific Electric railway spike, probably dating to as early as the 1920s, which I collected in 1994 from the old abandoned Downtown L.A. subway tunnel (now sealed as of 2008):
I would have a hard time just picking one. Three that I can think of right now is a GP38-2 operators manual, a menu from the Santa Fe El Capitan,and an Alco training service manual for switching locomotive. Ralph
This site may give you at least an on-line version: https://www.rr-fallenflags.org/manual/manual.htm Full disclosure: Mr. Elwood warns it may take a while to download any file. Also, this might give you at least something about the "El Capitan": https://www.rr-fallenflags.org/atsf/atsf.html Hoping these help!
I have a Rio Grande era tunnel and flanger warning sign. I have since fixed it, as the flanger sign on the prototype was below the tunnel sign.
Just picked up a marker light from a Missouri Pacific caboose, and a Union Pacific sign from a depot in Nebr.
they're at my mother's house, but as a kid in a small town we used to walk the railroad tracks and try to shoot out the glass insulators on the power lines with a pellet gun. I have a couple that didn't break that I kept, they're actually pretty valuable now but the nostalgia of walking the tracks in the summer with my friends just being unsupervised GenX miscreants is worth way more
