A couple of weeks ago, I posted a photo of an old steam locomotive in Jacksonville (OR). This is a metal plate from that locomotive. Not really being very knowledgeable about trains, I did a couple of google searches & discovered that these are known as builder's plates. Here is some information about them from www.railroadiana.org: Builders plates are castings or sheet metal plates that are attached to locomotives and other rolling stock to indicate the manufacturer, date of production, manufacturing number, and other information. In the steam locomotive era, builders plates were usually made of cast brass or iron. Often when a locomotive was scrapped, the builders plate was removed and retained as a memento. Thus the builders plate may be the only surviving remnant of a particular locomotive." And some info about this particular manufacturer from Wikipedia: "H. K. Porter, Inc. (Porter) manufactured light-duty railroad locomotives in the USA, starting in 1866. The company became the largest producer of industrial locomotives, and built almost eight thousand of them. The last locomotive was built in 1950, but the company continues to produce industrial equipment to this day. Porter was known for building locomotives that were much smaller than those normally used by the larger Class I railroads. The company's locomotives were small enough that they were often operated by only one person. Porter built mostly steam locomotives, but they also built some powered by gasoline and diesel engines, and some that ran on compressed air." The cracks were added by me during postwork (I used a Perfect Effects filter for that). Sorry, purists, I couldn't resist playing with it a little bit...