I'm several pages into this auction, and it seems to have some interesting artifacts. So far, it predominately is centered around railroads of the Northeast, though some sporatic West Coast items are in there too.

http://www.auctionzip.com/auction-catalog/catalog_RZC2Y5H69G

Whether you collect for yourself, or for your group, there are likely some good things here for you.

There's nothing in it for me, but as I was getting ready to email specific items to some people that I know, I decided to check here for a similar notice, and then decided to post about it.

James Hinman

In my early 1940s I started thinking about where the things I've collected should go. I've been giving away museum quality stuff to museums. I still have a collection but it is smaller and as I get older I want to make sure anything really significant is in a museum collection. When I see a huge auction like this it makes me glad I have done so.

I see some groups working hard to cosmetically restore a display engine and putting in thousands of hours and dollars only to find they need to cough up $2,500 for a headlight to finish the job. I don't want some object I own to have to be in that situation.

Jim Cray collected railroad artifacts, license plates and telephones for pretty much his entire 77 years of life. Some of his stuff was personal photos, written stories and accounts, his own art work, etc..... stuff you probably won't see in the auctions and which is probably already rotting in a landfill.

I tried for a long time to get Jim to assign his collection to a museum.... a museum where he volunteered for the last ten years of his life. But, he insisted, "No!" he was obsessed that there would be some kind of "grand mal siezure" of an auction for his stuff with people fighting for things, super high bidding, etc. One or two items maybe fit this category, but the rest is like what most everyone else has collected, just lots and lots and lots of it.

IMHO--Any time any 'collector' passes away and does not make arrangements for his collections, it is sad and a waste. That person spends his whole adult life, or more, collecting, spending money, time, effort, etc., getting it all and showing it off, and then that person thinks so much (actually, so little) of their life's effort that little or nothing is done to preserve what is left---a representation of that person's life story.

In this case, that collection WAS Jim's life's story and it will fade away and be disbursed until no sign or remembrance of him is left.

I do *not* understand why Jim allowed this to happen---I had many conversations with him about this exact thing. I used another person we both knew who was a large collector and who had passed and whose collection was sold off piecemeal. Jim was livid about that and would erupt in curses and complaints, but in the same breath admit he "got some good deals" at the auction--- his words!

Everyone please remember to see that what you now bother to own, collect, (hoard?!), etc is somehow passed on in a way that it advances **something** ; so that you and your efforts in the here-and-now are remembered as having done something that leaves a positive impact on what is left when you are gone, you know, 'leave the world in a better way than how you found it.' Try to see that stuff goes to a museum, university, library; is sold to pay for grandkid's college';, fill in what you want.

Just have the courage to admit you are a finite thing, probably way more finite than the artifacts you are collecting.

Thanks.

[rayg]

Thanks for the insight Ray. Jim certainly did have a heck of a collection.

I went over this collection with someone else and ended up describing it as "amazingly broad, incredibly shallow." Not being obsessed with lantern after lantern (where the hell do you PUT that many lanterns, anyway?), my eyes glazed over quickly. Only one item struck me as worth "crossing the street" for--the PRR chime whistle, which very early in the game already has enough attention and publicity that it's not cheap.

That being said, I remember an associate of mine telling me one time of attending a bi-weekly local "junk auction" in northeastern Pennsylvania two decades ago, being distracted in conversation, and then seeing a nice OLD rail lantern being held aloft and offered. "Nineteen........ twenty....... I have twenty, twenty-one............. twenty-two............ twenty-three..........." and said to himself, "Hell, for that cheap, I'm getting in..." and started to raise his hand as the auctioneer intoned "Twenty-three? Twenty-three?? Twenty-two hundred dollars I have, do we have twenty-three hundred?" My friend's jaw crashed to the floor. The lantern in question turned out to be from a rather obscure 19th-century road, possibly the Elmira, Corning & Northern or lesser, and likely the only surviving marked relic from said road.

It took me a couple of minutes to figure out that the Northern Electric telephone items are from a Bell System company like Western Electric, rather than being from the Northern Electric Railway.