Who's loco is it anyway...

From another field, one that I actually know something about, HMS Victory underwent a 'Great Repair' in 1800. She came out looking radically different but, due to the history of the repair we can be reasonably certain that she is essentially the same ship that was laid down in 1759. Except that over the years every timber in her has been replaced not only with new timber but, in most cases, with a different type of timber...

Many ships that went in for Great Repairs never came out again. That sort of repair could entail dismantling the entire ship and then putting it back together again. In an era when Parliament would only authorise a certain number of new ships to be built each year and that number was less than the number the RN needed the 'putting back together' could involve completely new timber arranged to a completely new design.

A related issue applies across the pond. USS Constellation lies in Baltimore Harbour and was for a long time promoted as a rebuild of the 1797 Frigate of that name. But it has been shown that the 1797 ship was broken up in the same yard the year before a new ship, a Sloop of War to a different and larger design, was built in 1854. This time round, however, deliberate forgery of documents, in the modern era, was involved in trying to 'pass off' the existing ship as being the 1797 one, albeit heavily modified. The problem is that this supposed provenance was used to justify removing parts of the original 1854 design hull and replacing them with 'correct 1797' sections.