For many decades the preservation of railway heritage in Chile sparked the interest of almost nobody, least of all Chilean State Railways (EFE). Hence, using the case of locomotives to illustrate the phenomenon, of EFE´s early engines, none were saved. The distribution by year of build of preserved steam locomotives is skewed towards more modern ones compared to that of all steam locomotives that there ever were. And, moreover, by far the majority of those preserved were withdrawn after 1950. See figure 1. Wagons and carriages had alternative uses and hence a few of them lived on for a decade or two after retirement, but LI deals with locomotives, so we shall limit ourselves to these.
In spite of the institutional in-difference, from the mid-1960s onwards, one representative of several types of EFE steam locomotives withdrawn from service, for scrapping, came to be stored on a pair of tracks in the northwesterly corner of the yard of the San Bernardo locomotive workshops. The initiative for this, as then workshop super-visor Mr. Guillermo Cruces told me during a walk around the site in the mid-1970s, came not from EFE itself, but from a group of employees at the shops1. The locomotives so saved from destruction were not restored,
