I know a lot of us are tempted when we see a lathe like that left to rust and potentially get scrapped. The lathe in the photo does not look all that old, and looks to be complete. Looking at the bedways, I wonder if Bertram furnished hardened & ground ways ?
The lathe is a heavy duty brute, for sure. When I see a crank & pinion to move the tailstock, that is when I start thinking: 'This is a heavy lathe'. It looks like a good basic engine lathe, and looks to have a camlock spindle nose. That being the case, the seller probably kept the chucks and faceplates for use on other lathes in his shop with the same spindle nose.
A thought as to it using too much power: If a person was not going to be using a lathe like this one to its full capacity, why not downsize the motor ? The motor on this lathe looks like a standard frame motor with mounting feet, nothing uncommon (like some of the flange-mounted motors on other heavy duty lathes). At the powerplant, when we bought a LeBlond 25" x 96" wide bed/heavy duty lathe, it originally had something like a 25 HP motor on it. Since we were never going to be hogging down rough forgings or castings, that much motor was not needed.
We were buying the lathe from Mr. Robert Yancey, out in Portland, Oregon. Mr. Yancey said a 10 HP motor with VFD would do just fine. That is what we ordered on that lathe. It is more than ample for the work done in the powerplant. There is an ammeter for "spindle usage", and even on the largest jobs done there (stuff like boring stubs of pipe out of 12" pipe flanges and re-bevelling large pipe flanges which had been cut off of piping), the lathe never laid down on us.
The lathe in this thread looks like it could be re-powered with a smaller motor and still do more work than most shops could have for it.
By way of comparison: we had a Southbend Nordic 25" x 96" lathe in our shop which we scrapped. It only had a 5 HP motor on it. I'd say motor size is a function of not just a lathe's capacity but how much rotating mass (gearing, spindle, chucks, etc) the motor has to start and keep turning, and how heavy the jobs are going to be that the lathe will be used for.
Since the lathe is outdoors and starting to rust, it would seem the seller ought to drop his price. Scrap steel and iron prices are somewhere near (or at) an all time low. The incentive to send the lathe to the razor blades isn't there. A local auto mechanic told me he was called by a customer to haul away an old car. He pulled everything off of it that could be salvaged for parts, including the engine. What he had left was a hull or shell with suspension and some running gear parts. He took the car to the crushers. 40 bucks in fuel to get his flatbed there and back, 27 bucks for the car as scrap. At least in the USA, steel and iron scrap are at so low a price that no one is bothering to haul much to the scrap yards. This could drive the price of that lathe down to the bargain basement, along with the fact the lathe is rusting and outdoors. It would be a hard bargain for anyone with the space for it to pass up. Nothing broken or brazed, nothing missing other than chucks and faceplate.