I'm going to be going out to the SF Bay Area this coming February to visit my mother. The wheels are turning as to seeing this crane and taking some measurements, etc while I am out there.
Our railroad has something like 120 active volunteers. We field some huge work parties, and after Irene, had right of way damage to deal with. We are rebuilding about 30 miles of track, and this is the main thrust. We've got people working on restoration of rolling stock, people working on overhaul and repairs to ROW maintainence equipment, people working at anything and everything from cutting brush to running trains (in season). I know if I float the idea at the next meeting of our Board, I can get some interest. The shortline and tourist RR industry is a kind of lodge. We have a sister organization called Empire State RR Museum, chartered as such. They would likely be the vehicle to receive the crane as a donation. We've had moves of historic equipment donated. Having a few veterans of many years service on CSX and other mainline roads, we know how to manuver and arrange moves. There is no doubt in my mind that the only way that crane would move anywhere is in pieces on some other carrier. We got lucky years ago on the move of a 2-8-0 steam locomotive from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Kingston, NY. The engine came east on a General Electric depressed center car that was heading home to Schenectady.
Our group has a way of making things happen. We may not have a huge formal organization or much in the way of money, but we manage and grow.
As for competent people to run a steam crane: anyone who has been around machinery and has a reasonable head on their shoulders can figure things out. Get someone who'se been running "friction" cranes (the old clutch/brake cranes vs the newer hydraulics) and get someone who has some basic knowledge of boilers and they will figure out and run a steam crane. It's all in how you approach things. Nowadays, everyone is obsessed with having manuals, DVD's, interactive software, or formal training for anything they are called upon to do. Well, back in the day, all of this stuff never existed. The name of the game was "figure it out for yourself". We've had to do it many times with all sorts of machinery and equipment and systems. It's like anything else, you start off slow, trace lines, get things sorted out and you go from there. If you are "in the seat" to run a crane, you make various moves to get the feel of how the crane responds. You find out if the clutches and brakes work properly or slip, and you work up to where you are running the whipline and main load block up and down, raising and lowering the boom, etc.
My buddy Ron Zinski tells stories of his uncle, who was a wrecking master on the LS & I RR in Marquette, Michigan years ago. The wrecking crane was steam, and so old it was reeved with chain instead of wire rope. The friction lining on the brakes for the swing, and hoists was pretty much worn off. The crane operator used to keep a bucket of coal cinders and a can or kerosene handy. He or one of the guys in the crew would throw coal cinders into the brake bands to get the brakes to hold. SOmetimes, this would lock them on or the cinders would make the brakes drag, so they'd pour some kerosene onto the brakes. The operator knew the old crane and apparently untangled a lot of derailed ore cars with the crane in that condition. No manual would ever cover those sorts of situations.
Nowadays, people think every crane has a load chart, and the newer cranes have onboard computers that have inputs for boom angle, boom extension, and hook load that can shut things down if you get into trouble. The older cranes often had no load chart. The booms often had been scabbed back together after someone crippled them or damaged them... the counterweights were added onto with anything available.... it came down to the operator's sense of what the crane was going to do. On old cranes the turntable rollers and centerpin might be loose, so when the crane "got light in the ass end" on a heavy pick, that was the operator's sensor. I've seen lots of older cranes like that, and when it was all you had to work with overseas.... you went with it. You figured the weight of what you were going to pick, figured your rigging and what the wire rope on the crane was likely good for, and if that was good you left the rest in the hands of the operator.
I got up on the old Bucyrus Erie crane at Gasup the first year I fired it, and it took me all of about 15 minutes to trace lines out and figure out what I needed to know. The unknown to me was how the boiler would steam on slabwood and how it would respond to steam demand, how much induced draft the hoisting engne would put up the stack, etc. The only way to find out was to fire the boiler lightly and build a head of steam slowly, then see how the boiler responded under load. Hanford Mills' plant was much the same, determining how the boiler would respond, what draft was needed to make steam for the engines, and we got it down. I was taught the basics early on, and one thing I was taught was to trace lines, and to think things out, then start slow and feel my way carefully.
An example of this was back at Brooklyn Tech HS in the 60's. We all took machine shop courses. In one shop room, you might find Hendey geared head lathes. Another shop room might have some Lodge and Shipley's or Reed and Prentice's. Our teachers came "out of industry". They taught us kids the basics. No manuals on the machine tools, nothing labelled beyond the basic speed/feed/thread charts that the machine tool builders put on at the factory. What we were taught to do is to "put the headstock between gears and roll the spindle over by hand.... see what the levers on the apron do without the lathe under power...." We were pretty much on our own to figure out the particulars of how to actually "run" the machine tools after our first semester of machine shop class. We'd pull things over by hand and get the feel of things, and it worked.
It's not different in a powerplant or around heavy equipment. You need to keep your head and look, trace, and figure things our for yourself. I like to tell the people who insist they must have the manuals, DVD's, interactive training software, etc that SOMEONE at SOMETIME in the murky past had to invent and design and startup the first boilers, engines, turbines, and all else or we would never have come this far. Those predecessors had NO ONE to ask or to teach them. We cannot go through life expecting people to be running ahead of us handing us manuals, training or whatever we think we need to do a job. I, for one, never let a lack of manuals, or formal training stop me. I was taught to think and figure stuff out, and to proceed in a reasoned and safe way.
To digress, the alumni association of my alma mater has stopped calling me for donations. The reason is simple. I told them that engineering school was simply a place to get me "ticket to the game", a diploma which the front offices in this world seem to require. I told the alumni association that engineering school was too damned theoretical (and that was 40 years ago), and did a piss poor job of preparing me for the real world or practicing engineering. I told them the best professors I ever had were not found in their hallowed halls, but in the machine shops, jobsites, powerplants and engine rooms as well as a few barrooms in the form of machinists, toolmakers, boilermakers, millwrights, pipefitters, ironworkers, marine and stationary engineers and firemen, and a few barmaids thrown in. I told my alma mater that I got the most applicable parts of my engineering education at Brooklyn Technical High School, and no thanks to my alma mater, found my PE exam a complete snap. I told my alma mater to call when they started teaching young people to be "real" engineers. I haven't had a call in a few years, which is fine by me.
Oldtime engineers and mechanics simply figure stuff out. If we have to run a crane, we can handle it. If we have to fire a boiler, we trace lines and figure things out and handle it. If we have to move a locomotive or repair a bridge, we handle it. If I have to climb the iron on a railroad bridge and take measurements and "run numbers" to determine load capability or simply the weight of a built up section of bridge steel, I do it. If my buddies have to jack up a span and put new bearings under it, or if we have to do rivetted repairs, we do them. At work, it's much the same. If we have to overhaul a hydro turbine or swap out a 300 ton transformer or deal with a 500 year flood, we handle that too. I get calls from the equivalent of "Outages R Us", anytime we have an outage scheduled at our powerplant. These contractors want to come right in and do the outage work, handling anything and everything. They seem flabbergasted when I tell them we do our own outage work with our house gangs, and we do our own engineering in house. This is how it is supposed to happen. People have a full set of senses and a brain as standard equipment, but today;s world has done a real good job of minimizing the need for using this equipment they way it was meant to be used. Old machine tools and things like steam cranes require a person to use their own "standard equipment" in the ways it was meant to be used, not in the dumbed down way that relies too much on having "someone" ahead to have manuals, training programs and similar in place.
We'll see where the idea goes, but it's nothing we have not handled before.