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1963 · LAW DEPARTMENT OF SMALL DECEPTIONS, RAILROAD DIVISION
The swap: The steam locomotive Fort Wayne displays and steams as Nickel Plate Road No. 765 spent its first nine years of retirement as No. 767. When the city asked the railroad for a display engine for Lawton Park, it asked specifically for the 767 — the Berkshire that had hauled the first train over the new Nickel Plate elevation on 4 October 1955. The 767 proved to be in poor mechanical condition. So in 1963 the numbers were switched: the sound 765 went into the park wearing 767's number, and the true 767 — the engine the city had actually wanted — went to scrap wearing 765's. The deception was an open, documented transaction, not a rumor. The Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society, founded in 1972, leased the engine from the city, pulled it from the park in September 1974 and rebuilt it at New Haven; on 1 September 1979 it moved under its own steam for the first time in twenty-one years, its own number restored. It works excursions still, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 — one of the largest operating steam locomotives in America, famous under its own name at last.
Sources: the Trains section of this history, from the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society's record — built at Lima in September 1944, last run June 1958, the 1963 number switch, the 1974 removal and 1975–79 restoration, excursions from 1982; the Museums section — the society's founding in 1972 and the National Register listing of 12 September 1996; the Nickel Plate elevation record — the 767 as first engine over the elevation, October 1955.