Yesterday the Mad River & NKP Museum pawned off on me a truck and trailer load of drawings from the P&WV. It appears to be from the civil engineers department as its largely maps, right of way drawings, bridge drawings, property maps etc. A few thousand drawings in all. I have no idea what to do with them, but I do have a dry space to store them until a proper repository can be found, assuming there is somewhere with the ability to handle such a large collection.

Just putting the word out there that this collection exists. Anyone with an interest in the P&WV out there?

Perhaps the actual P&WV might want them. The holding company that owns P&WV, Power REIT, is in litigation with NS over the lease of the P&WV. Part of the issue is how NS has accounted for property betterments and retirements during the lease.

You might try the University of Pittsburgh's Business School library.

Or Carnegie Institute.

You might try to contact this link: http://www.thepwvhiline.com/

I recall they or someone in this group had mechanical drawings saved out of the Rook Yards near Pittsburgh about 20 + years ago.

Also the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum in Strasburg has an archive for railroad material pertaining to railroads in the state of Pennsylvania. They have a website.

Rich

Fixed that for you.

Because a "Pennsylvania Railroad museum" wouldn't have any interest in stuff from the P&WV, but as the curators have told me over the years, they occasionally have trouble getting non-PRR material offered to them precisely because too many people make the (very incorrect) assumption that they're just a "Pennsylvania Railroad museum".

Contact them and see what they say.

I'm a bit astounded that no one has mentioned the Pennsylvania State Archive as a possibility -- or provided Rick with contact information either for Nick at RRMPA or David at the Archives. I'm not in a position to provide those in 'up to date' form, but I'm pretty sure Nick reads RyPN Interchange and others here will have the necessary direct contact information (e.g., more direct than 'research@rrmuseumpa.org') and post it here.

Didn't we start a 'sticky' page with cut-to-the-chase contact information for various people at historical and technical organizations and museums?

Rick,
By all means consider the Hi-Line group. I work with these guys on occasion and they are hip as to how to preserve documents. They're currently putting the finishing touches on a new work room and storage room. The goal is to catalog and eventually get as much digitized as possible.

Based on conversations we have had online, it's safe to say that he (i.e. Nick Zmijewski, curator) does lurk here.

The problem is that:
1) Commonwealth employees not in an official "public relations" position end up under rather stringent control and oversight as to precisely what presence they may have online or in the media with relation to their positions, in enormous part because far too many people out there in the public are more than eager to construe, or more likely misconstrue, any utterance of any state employee in any position above garbage collector as "official state policy." As one made-up example, a curator could say that they would be interested in looking at the offered collection in question, and either an entire tractor-trailer load shows up with NO warning, or someone puts them on eBay with the claim "The state museum says these are priceless artifacts!"
2) Precisely because of such problems of what I have alluded to above and for other legal reasons, museum officials of the Pa. Historic & Museum Commission--and, as I am to understand it, a LOT of other state and federal museum folks--are expressly forbidden from saying outright "we would like XXXXXX for the Museum collection". Instead, there are spectacular Kabuki dances where they allude like crazy as to "how nice that might look at our museum... [whistles, looks at ceiling]..." As well, the Friends of the Railroad Museum of Pa. (and several other such "friends" groups for other operations/museums) are instead the ones that manage such things as discussing donations or acquisitions, prioritizing potential acquisitions, etc.

That's precisely why I said he 'reads RyPN' -- and did not call for him, or someone like Nick Fry or Chris Baer, to comment here.

After the recent Steamtown scrapping I'm a little less sanguine that all the important preservation figures 'keep up' with the Interchange, but I suspect that any difficulty with appropriately high-level people realizing the importance of Rick's P&WV material will not be great going forward. (Please don't prove me wrong.)

Pursuing leads! Thanks. Better days are ahead for the collection.

Just wondering where the collection is headed, should it be made available to researchers at some point.

Thank you,

Susan Yosten
Erie, PA

Still working on it! Nothing to report yet.