For sale: One Watson Park locomotive

Wanna buy a used locomotive?

The city is selling a 1994 C.P. Huntington miniature train that used to be at O.J. Watson Park.

The locomotive is listed as one of the items in the city’s Sept. 29 surplus auction. The top bid as of Monday afternoon was $3,200.

But buyer beware.

The sale advertisement says the engine has “transmission issues, does not pull when it is hot,” has a “broken differential frame” and that the “show wheels do not turn.”

But other than that, it’s a miniature locomotive with a bell to ring.

“We were talking significant dollars to repair it,” Troy Houtman, the city’s director of parks and recreation, said of the train for sale. “We thought it was better to put that investment in a new locomotive than put money in something that was going to be replaced.”

Houtman thinks it might make a great item to display somewhere or perhaps – if a person is a handy mechanic – they could repair it and keep it going. But, if it is repaired, it will need its own tracks.

And it weighs more than 3 tons.

The old train engine was built in 1994 by Chance Manufacturing and can no longer handle the demand of the park’s passengers, Houtman said. In recent years, it had two major overhauls and was often down for repairs, according to a 2015 article in The Eagle.

Last year, the City Council approved $300,000 in general obligation bonds for a new train engine, a passenger car and other park improvements. The parks department began using the new locomotive this past spring.

This story was originally published September 19, 2016 at 9:00 PM with the headline "For sale: One Watson Park locomotive."