I ran across this while sniffing for Houdini. It may be of interest to some of you who collect locks.

http://www.railroadiana.org/fakes/pgFakes_Locks.php

Or eneter railroad fake locks in your search engine.

As a rule, most people here only collect cuffs and do not give a squirt of piss about locks......however, I am the exception to that rule. =)

I use to be really good at spotting fakes but then the fake lock makers got one step ahead of me and started producing some good forgeries. The emmbossed fake RR locks, for the most part, are made from genuine old padlocks and are VERY well crafted! If the price is not too bad, they are worth the money due to the amount of work put into them. However, if they have a huge price tag on them and they are being presented as the real deal, then the collector just needs to walk away. No need to make a scene......the seller will just claim the same Ol' BS, "I got this from a guy who's Grandpa was a RR worker for 50 years.....blah, blah, blah." And he or she will not even believe that it is a fake so save your breath. The Eastern Indian crap with the brass tags on them show up quite a bit but they will not fool anyone that has been collecting for a while. This type of lock will commonly have one of several names on it like: Colt Firearms, Winchester, San Quinten Death Row, Alcatraz Prison San Fransisco, Pacific RR, B&O RR, Yuma Prison, and more. They are functional lever locks that are aged but they are not very old and they are not worth much more than the scrap price of the metal.

Thanks for the link! BTW, there is a great website that has a boatload of info on it about fake locks (and real locks too) but you have to be a member of the ALCA to get into the main part of the site.

http://www.alca.name/

They have a great article on the Keen Kutter fakes that are now all over eBay......and they are a hell of a lot better quality than the old ones (they have fooled a LOT of collectors)!

Cheers, Mike D~C/

As I know some of the people here, you are not alone in being interested in locks. There are even guys here who buy and sell these.

are you sure they are not "salesmens samples"?....very rare, but e-bay sometimes has these treasures listed.

Who collects handcuffs and restraints and doesn't give a squirt for locks and keys? No retraints collection would be complete without darby end locks, padlocks for belly chains and antique jail keys. Bottom line is people that collect restraints are just a specialized sub-set of the larger group of lock collectors.