Cool pictures and thanks for sharing them. It really does show another era, these days wandering into the scrapyard like that would likely at the very least get someone nastily telling you to vacate the premises, trespassing, etc. Very different time, back then if the kid fell and hurt themselves the scrap yard wouldn't face a lawsuit, someone like your dad would rack it up to the kid had an accident.
As far as the scrapping of these being a cultural crime and the like, the problem is things are often seen in hindsight not seen at the time. I remember my mom talking about things that became hot collectors items, like comic books and even more mundane stuff, like the log cabin syrup can that became a bank (from the 1930's), that became a big collectors item? How many of us in the day put baseball cards in the spokes of our bikes that later on went on to become valuable? I wish that they had saved some of the Hudsons and T1's and the like, but at the time they were depreciated, worn out assets that they could get some money for in scrap. A lot of the engines that were preserved (and this is just my view, others probably know a lot more than I do) seem almost to happen by luck, an engine wasn't immediately scrapped , sat rusting away someplace, and by then the nostalgia for steam already had happened. Some of them were preserved/saved it seems to me because by the time railroads had almost gotten rid of steam, they realized it was the end of the era and saved them (or someone else realized it, and somehow got the railroad to sign them over).
Think about when you own a car and it comes to the point where you decide it is too old to sell it, doesn't have any other value to you, so you junk it. Lot of cars like that were junked that today are classic fetching a lot of money (my parents had some cars, like an olds 98 convertible from the early 50's, a 1939 LaSalle, that would be worth a lot today, my mom's uncle offered them a custom 1928 Cadillac convertible (there were like 7 or 8 of them built) with an aluminum hood and other unique features, that car today would likely be priceless..but who thinks of that? Even with the destruction of Penn Station while there were people at the time who realized what was being lost, it was a station owned by a railroad that was bankrupt in a time when it seemed that trains weren't going to matter in the day of the plane and car, a station that needed a lot of maintenance and repair and was expensive to operate, and where the company could make a lot more money selling the air rights by knocking it down. It is sad, it also is one of the reasons why things that have historical meaning or practical public use should not be the province of immediate financial need (and why landmarks laws came about, that certain things help define a place), but in the end all of us make decisions we regret based on the practicalities of the time
