I was wondering if anyone knew who has the H.L. Broadbelt collection of BLW negatives (1860-1956)? Did they stay together, scattered to the winds or lost?

Today I stumbled across a typed catalog of BLW negatives at the Book Barn in Niantic Ct. The catalog was printed in 1975 and is 101 typed pages, of about 8000 negatives, the negatives are listed by Purchasing Railroad & Unit #, and indicates the Wheel Config, Neg # and image size. If the collection is still around I would like to get copies of some of the negatives listed in the catalog. In 1975 the ordering address was in Newport News, VA.

Thanks,
Rich C.

FYI: For those of you not familiar with Book Barn, while it doesn't have much in the way of railroad books (about 3 bookshelves) it does have a lot of everything else in used books across 4 properties. They are on Main St / Rt 156 in Niantic, 2 of the stores are in the center of Niantic and the other 2 are about 1 mile west. If you are allergic to cats avoid the 2 locations on the edge of town (Main Barn and Store 4) and the Downtown shop, as there are a few furry 4 legged employees, usually imitating throw pillows..., the Midtown Shop only has 2 legged employees. http://www.bookbarnniantic.com

P.P.S. If anyone is interested there was also 1 catalog volume of the BLW photo collection at the DeGolyer Library, at Southern Methodist University (Vol 2 IIRC), as I had already inquired with them about the locomotive, I left the catalog at the Store.

Using a little Goggle foo, it appears they are at Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.


http://www.rrmuseumpa.org/about/library ... tion.shtml


"18,200 original glass plate and film negatives of builder's photographs from the Herbert L. Broadbelt Collection of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1871-1954; "

-Hudson

They are also all scanned and searchable. There was a paper catalog of what the Museum has that is no longer in print though I believe they still have some copies in storage.
Additionally, there are spec cards there but they are not yet scanned in any meaningful way.

Are the scanned images on their site somewhere? I looked, but didn't see any signs.

http://rrmuseumpa.andornot.com/ Click on advanced search. Limit the first box to search collections and put in Baldwin. There is a check box to limit to records with images and use that too. This should give you all 17,000+ and you can refine the search from there. There were some negatives that were in such poor condition that they were unscanable. The rest are on there. New thumbnails that are larger but watermarked are planned for later in the year.

Hudson,

You might be surprised what came up when I searched for Broadbelt Collection... Probably the search system assumed that Broadbelt was 2 words, by what came up.

So thanks for the connection.

Rich C.

There are also some color images in the Baldwin collection as well. The Kodachrome of BLW 6000 is stunning ! How about a VO-1000 for the ACL painted purple ! Sadly, many were taken using Ektachrome and the colors have shifted dramatically !
Worth taking a look at.

Kevin K.

I found that using a little creativity with search terms helped. Different catalogers tended to use different descriptions. I got several builder's photos of the Alaskan variation of USATC Consolidations from them last week. They were helpful and responses to my emails and filling the order were reasonably prompt.

In addition to Nick's description above, there are also seven cartons of BLW photographs in MG-427 Baldwin-Hamilton Collection at the PA State Archives, Harrisburg, Pa. Some of these images include original BLW color transparencies that are not at Strasburg. For those desiring a complete history of the Herbert L. Broadbelt collection are urged to consult a detailed history I wrote about the collection in one of the back issues of The Milepost, journal of the Friends of the RR Museum that was published in 2006. Also see Brian Solomon, Baldwin Locomotives (Voyageur Press, 2009).