GUEST: I got them from my house. I bought the house, and I found them downstairs on a shelf.
APPRAISER: And what did you think when you first unrolled them?
GUEST: I thought they were pretty amazing. They looked original. Wasn't able to find out a whole lot. I learned a lot about the Pullman industry.
APPRAISER: Okay. They're fascinating. First of all, let's talk about what they are. They are original ink drawings, actual technical drawings, engineering drawings. And here we can see this particular box freight car was built by the Pullman Company, Pullman, Illinois. And Pullman, as you know, they not only built cars, but they also had a planned community…
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: …in Illinois, and they also worked managing a lot of the railroad systems. So this is obviously a technical drawing for a boxcar that they were going to either build or propose to build. And plus you have how many other drawings here?
GUEST: There are a total of seventeen.
APPRAISER: Seventeen.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: Many of them have dates on them, but most of them seem to be from 1900. We could talk a lot about Pullman and their communities and the cars that they made, but the reality is, these drawings transcend the value of the connection to Pullman. Yes, there'd be some people who would be interested in it, but the reality here, these are fantastic Industrial Age drawings. And that's really where the market is. And this is a great portrait of a boxcar. And it's not a blueprint, it's not a Xerox, it's not computer-aided design. It's somebody who took the time to draw every line of this by hand. So we put this in a context... frame it and put it in a decorative environment, put it in somebody's home with modern furnishings, and we now have a wonderful piece of art. And that's really where the value lies in these drawings. Honestly, looking at them, I think, unframed, we'd be talking about, for the kind of uninteresting ones or more kind of technical detail ones…
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: …maybe somewhere in the $300 to $500 range. But for the fully formed cars, I think we're easily in the $800 to $1,200 apiece. And then framed up, you could command, in a retail environment, maybe as much as $3,000.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: So looking at the archive, I mean, they're great. There's some just really fascinating details. Every little rivet, every little bit of detail, is drawn here. I think if I was to put a number for retail, I'd say easily $10,000 for them unframed.
GUEST: Wow-- okay, for the whole set, then.
APPRAISER: For the whole set.
GUEST: Okay, wow.
APPRAISER: I think they're fabulous.
