GUEST: This is a railroad sales book for Wallace R. Lee, who worked for the Baldwin Locomotive Company, and he traveled the world for Baldwin for years and years selling steam engines. He was my first wife's grandfather, so he's my son's great-grandfather. And I knew him, he lived to be 100. But when he died, this came to me.
APPRAISER: So you brought this lovely book, elegantly bound in this brown Morocco, and it comes with a little travel case. And the book is full of these photographs. So we have the illustration of the, of the train on the front, and then the train specs on the back. And he's got a note, note here for how many engines he sold. He sold four different engines of this single one. And here, here are some other examples. The earliest date I saw was about 1905 to 1911. Tons of information, including, at least on one example, how much people paid, which is noticeably absent from some of the others. But even on one, on this one example here, he's done a little math, where he sold, it says he sold three for $83,300, and he's worked it out to, it's about $27,000 per engine. Which is good, that's, this is our question.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: How much did these, did these things cost?
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: They cost a tremendous amount of money.
GUEST: A lot of money, yeah.
APPRAISER: In 1906 dollars. I like pieces like this one that appeal to a lot of different collecting areas, right? There's a lot of meat here, obviously, for vintage photography collectors, right? Because there are probably 80 examples of vintage photography of trains.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Um, there, and then, of course, if you are interested in railroad history, there's even more meat here for you. There are the photographs. Many of these may be lost examples of trains. And then a very concise, detailed listing of all of the specs of the train. At auction, we'd list it for $800 to $1,200, but where it lands is anybody's guess.
GUEST: Sure. Great-- it would be difficult to have salesmen's samples of engines.
APPRAISER: Of engines, exactly.
GUEST: Yes.
