NASHVILLE — The seven-year effort to take former Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis 4-8-4 No. 576 from static display in a Nashville park to operating locomotive and regional tourist attraction is entering its final phase, with caretakers Nashville Steam Preservation Society Inc. launching a new matching campaign to raise $350,000 to finish the job.
“We are at the stage in the restoration where instead of sending out parts and components for rebuilding, or taking things apart at our shop in Nashville, we’re poised to start reassembling the locomotive,” society President Shane Meador said in a press release. “For the last two years, progress has been hard to measure for the casual observer, but by spring, we intend to reinstall the 576’s massive 30 tons of driving wheels, and it will start to look like a locomotive again.”
The new Last Mile Campaign is made possible by $100,000 in matching funds from the Walter Ferguson Charitable Trust and $75,000 from The Right Track Foundation. With these funds, all donations of $576 or more will be matched dollar for dollar. Nashville Steam is hopeful of reaching the matching-campaign goal this year and anticipates other matching opportunities still to come in 2023.
Donations can be made online at the Nashville Steam website or by mail to Nashville Steam, 220 Willow St., Nashville, TN 37210.
“Barring any unforeseen issues, we anticipate reassembly throughout the year and important testing to begin later in 2024 or early 2025,” said Joey Bryan, Nashville Steam communications manager. “That milestone won’t be historic just for us in Nashville, but will be the first time since 1952 that a steam locomotive from the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway will have operated.”
The locomotive will eventually operate on passenger excursion trains. Nashville Steam’s efforts are to model its plans after successful attractions elsewhere in the U.S., where similar heritage tourism offerings and historic train rides can bring 20,000 to 80,000 visitors or more per year.
I worked in the Nashville area for a couple years. I actually made a visit to Tennessee Central Railway Museum when they were just starting the restoration. I even bought a jar of sand they found in the, well, sand dome. Glad to hear they’re almost finished.