After dieselization, the TdM no longer needed the boiler shop at the TdM shops, but left it intact because maybe someday they could use it, and until that day it would make a good storehouse. The TdM didn’t end up using it for much; locomotive spare parts, mainly, but this big barn with an overhead crane & 2 tracks (when the TdM shops was maintaining their steam fleet, heavy boiler work would see the offending locomotive pushed into the boiler shop where the overhead crane would pluck off its boiler for work, while the rest of the locomotive either hung out either inside or out in the storage yard or was towed to the erecting shop for any more work it needed; but the 244s really wanted more of a cleanroom to maintain, and a large chunk of the erecting shop was sitting empty and could be partitioned off as a dust-resistant diesel shop.)

After the Parsons Vale spun off ILW as a separate subsidiary, the boiler shop went along with it. ILW couldn’t think of a use for it (GE’s 22nd century innovation of an assembly line was a long ways in the future and ILW was getting most of its business doing small custom(ish) orders) which turned out to be fortuitous, because starting in the 1980s some very rare locomotive were traded in which ILW’s employees couldn’t bear to cut, so would tuck away in the unused storage building that was the boiler shop.

The first pair of locomotives were a pair of Fairbanks-Morse “Erie-built” diesels, which were traded in at the end of 1971, by the Newark, Allentown, & Harrisburg Railroad when that road dumped its powerful but persnickity fleet of FM power. And by this time, the only surviving Erie-builts were these two ex-NYC cab units and a handful of boosters that had been converted from locomotives to a rail welding train.

There were a bunch of other engines coming in as trade-in units when these Erie-builts showed up, so the dismantling crew, who had a couple of railfans in it (this was still the era when railroad workers could be foamers w/o being jeered out of the industry), quickly pulled out the salable parts (the big OP prime mover, traction engines, and generator), then slipped the gutted bodies into the empty boiler house, where omerta kept management from knowing about them for over 40 years.

It might have been longer, but the great plague of 2019 forced ILW into spreading out their by now large production line, and the boiler shop was suggested as a new indoor space. Imagine the operations staff’s surprise when the facilities superintendent unlocked an entrance, walked in and almost bumped into this:

It was not long after this when the existance of these locomotives (which had been written off by the 1980s as another treasure that was lost to the breakers yard) leaked out, and, *sigh*, ILW had to start offering a rarities tour and hire more security staff just to keep (more: with the Parsons Vale being the last Alco stronghold in North America there was already a steady stream of nocturnal visitors trying to get the 5-finger discount) “collectors” from trying to get into ILW to strip parts.

The pile of stored engines are still in the boiler house, and still as intact as they were when they were shoved in there in the first place.