As most of you are aware, Kalmbach Magazine, the publisher of Trains, Classic Trains and Model Railroader among others has sold their assets to Chattanooga, Tenn. -based Firecrown Media.

The Milwaukee offices are being shut down, and they are in the process of moving out. I've heard that most if not all of the staff is staying on, not sure if they'll switch to remote work or relocate.

My question is about the large reference library Kalmbach had on site. An amazing collection of vintage photos and books, all carefully organized and catologed. Is that being moved to Tennesse? If not, is it going someplace else? Presumably it's being preserved, just curious as to how.

Also, while off topic, what's going to happen to the various model railroad layouts?

I was told, thirdhand, that at least one rail archive in Michigan was offered a small subset of some Kalmbach holdings--I think some newsletters or periodicals pertaining to Michigan lines--and that other specifically focused archives had been contacted for similar holdings transfer, but that they were in turn were told "the rest" of the library was remaining intact for the time being.

The newest (August) issue of Trains just showed up in my mailbox yesterday, about two days earlier than usual for me, and it officially marks the transition to new ownership, with Firecrown being listed as the publisher and including a "welcome" letter from Firecrown CEO Craig Fuller on Page 2 (inside cover). More importantly, it still lists Thomas Hoffman as "Librarian" on the Trains.com side of the masthead. How much of that is simply repasted inertia and how much of it can be considered future planning is, of course, up in the air.

The impression Fuller's essay gives is that he is a bit overwhelmed by the potential of what he has just acquired. He openly states that his initial plan was "to shutter the print magazine and focus on the digital edition" (at least for Trains). But somewhere along the way he has had a change of idea, if not heart.

The looming, unasked question, of course: IF this archive were indeed to be liquidated............ where would it go? And what good would it do? Every notable rail library that I have been to or worked with remains "appointment only" at best, one example being the California State RR Museum:
https://www.californiarailroad.museum/v ... y/about-us
Of course, Kalmbach's library was off-limits to the public as well except for projects deemed of benefit to the company. I can tell you that an AWFUL lot of what Kalmbach retained on their shelves is duplicated elsewhere at Barriger, CSRM, IRM, DeGolyer, the RR Museum of Pa., and the Md. Rail Heritage Library. Kalmbach's was a working reference library for a staff, not a horde for the horde's sake. Further, at least some of these archives are downsizing or rationalizing their holdings themselves, restricting their holdings to railroads pertinent to their state, region, or specialty. It's not like you go to CSRM or MRHL to look for info on the German Kriegsloks or Gresley Pacifics (although, oddly, the latter has both if you figure out where to look, thanks to me).

The photo collection is a whole 'nuther can of worms. Wanna bring the Center for Railroad Photography to its knees overnight?

That seemed to be the way Trains was heading for years. The print price was rather high, and included digital access as well if I recall correctly. Buying a second publication also included that, meaning that since I subscribe to Trains, Model Railroader and Classic Trains I'm paying for the digital stuff 3 times. Then to top it off, I buy Trains Unlimited or whatever it's called, to get access to back issues. Once I buy that, it's really stupid to buy the print stuff at all, except that I prefer to have it in print.

I would be interested in knowing about the photo and negative collection.
Back in the '70s, William K. Barham gave me his whole photo/negative collection. There was some missing negatives which I asked him about.
He said that he loaned negatives to people like Lucius Beebe, Trains Magazine and Don Ball. That put me on a search to find the missing. Don Ball came through, but nothing in the Beebe collection at CRHS. When he was alive, Charles Clegg did an exhaustive search (in his words) and came up empty except for a couple of Ivan Oaks prints from the '30s.
Kalmbach never responded. The Milwaukee Mafia! I know they printed a lot of his stuff back in the '40s, including the ones missing in his collection.
People who would sit on their collection for bragging rights and never share seemed to be the norm "back in the day".
There are some sad stories about widows, etc dumping collections. One superb photographer from the St. Louis area was swindled out of his collection of beautiful work by a well known guy and author and none of it has surfaced since 1969. "I'll just load up all these negs, photos, slides and beautiful movies and be back next week with a cashier's check". What a shame!
I sold my whole Frisco collection to a gentleman who paid well, and is going to donate them to a college so it will all be accessible to the public.I want anybody who wants to see any of it to be able to.

You've highlighted a HUGE problem: Curation of photo collections.

The long-standing museum collections protocol is to keep all donated collections intact by photographer or collector. That simply doesn't work for a publishing house, or even a railroad library.

Supposing I want to find a photograph of Rockville Bridge, or Helmstetter's Curve, or a particular station in Iowa. If I have no idea who took the photo, and they're sorted by photographer, I'm S.O.L. as they say. Meanwhile, what if I just want attractive street scenes of streetcars ion Chicago, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles, no matter who the photographer was? Do we look by car type, by line, by street, by neighborhood? I've gone through hundreds of prints just to find ONE random atmospheric street scene.

To properly search such a collection digitally, someone has to have entered ALL the data--the railroad, the number of the loco/car/trolley, the location, the photographer, the date............ and so many times so many of those fields are empty. And you HAVE to standardize some fields--decide they will be "MPA" and not "Ma & Pa," for example. That Ingalls Shipbuilding loco--am I looking for "Ingalls," "GM&O," "1900," "4-S," "Mississippi," or what? Does the location of that stock 3/4 roster shot matter?

I had a proposal to put together a book on covered bridges for a publisher. I called up a friend of mine whom I knew had probably the largest collection of CB slides in the nation, tens of thousands of shots of bridges, most long gone. I asked if I could go through his collection looking for attractive photos of bridges for this book. The only thing he could wrap his head around was "Tell me which bridges you need, and I'll pull them up for you if I have them." I tried, repeatedly, to impress upon him that the quality of the photos was more important than the specific bridges pictured. It was all in vain. It was like arguing with Sheldon Cooper. He literally hung up on me the last time we spoke. He later died, and reports were that the collection was scattered to the winds by a combination of "helpful" "thieves" and well-meaning acquaintances.

I have had archives make me fill out a requisition slip for each individual photo that looked promising in the catalog--just to look at it. I've had others including the Library of Congress, turn me loose to go through the photo folders after days of security clearances and ID processing.

It's entirely possible the Kalmbach staff, once "walking eidetic encyclopedia" George Drury retired, had no way of knowing if they had said negatives, or where to look. Simply saying "William K. Barham" isn't going to cut it. UNLESS someone has expended the CONSIDERABLE energy and expense to catalog and scan how many hundreds of thousands of photos, slides, and negatives. (From what I was told, Kalmbach tried never to keep original slides or negatives unless they purchased them outright, unlike "The Black Hole Of Newton," Jim Boyd, who was simply personally overwhelmed.)

Much as we would like to think better of them, the fact is that going to ANY publisher and expecting them to be able to hunt down the negative of a photo used eighty or so years ago is straining credulity. Even if we were talking Time/Life.

Not to derail this away from Kalmbach, but to add..

Museum photo archives has been a real sour spot for me. I am really glad to see the things that Barringer, the Center for RR Photography and a few others have been doing. It gives me faith that things are going in a direction.

Two things really burn me:

1 - Reproduction rates. Lets face it, none of what most of us do book wise in this hobby is going to be an Amazon Top 50 best seller. We are doing hobby books and articles, and we are not getting rich off of it. I have been quoted over $500.00 for ONE photo to use in a book run of less then 1000 copies. This is common place at the larger "corporate" style museums.

By no means am I advocating for free usage, but it needs to be reasonable for the things we do. I totally understand the collection has to be housed, scanned, stored, etc. and these things cost money, but there is a line.

2 - Historical Society (NRHS groups, T&HS, society type places) that hoard collections, and only let things out when the member of the month says so, or when they like the project. Some groups, totally fantastic to work with. Others, not so much. Mention the wrong persons name (even if they are not involved), and your research request just went out the window. Also, see point #1.

I know several people in the scale model manufacturing area, and I have heard countless stories about research requests. It is now an absolute last ditch effort for some of these companies to approach a society with a research request, even when they will be the first ones to pick it apart if its wrong.

It just boils down to - what is the point of saving this stuff, if groups make it totally impossible to view, let alone use.

This will get interesting as time goes on and more and more print style things are shifted over to blogs and websites.

Over the years with an intent of writing a book…someday, I have amassed a decent collection of photographs via swap meets and other collectors. While some are original prints, a good portion are reproductions. In nearly all cases, the photographer is unknown. How should I handle the reproduction rights when I go to publish?

My employer, a history museum, has over 70,000 local images in our collection, a good chunk is searchable online resulting in inquiries from around the world. Our archivist goes to great lengths to ensure that images have been scanned and available as thumbnails with our watermark. If a print is requested, we have partnered with Zenfollio which has eliminated our internal need for printing and mailing services AND the need for charging a large fee. For publishing purposes, we expressly state that it is the publisher’s responsibility for any copyright claims. When working directly with the author and in lieu of a fee, our archivist requests a copy of the published work for our library. In all cases of reproduction, we request that our museum is given photo line credit.

Our collection is publicly owned. Among our custodial responsibilities is to make the collection available for public use…not a cash cow. Other institutions have differing opinions regarding their holdings.

I don't wish to further derail and dilute this topic but to add on to what you're saying. One of the things that really gets me is the inconsistency in reproduction rates. I was recently searching for a drawing of a brake diagram for an open hopper car for eventual scale model production. The railroad historical society had an excel database telling me where this drawing was, and I looked and couldn't find it. So, I searched the excel database of the State Archives, which also had a copy of the drawing, which I had them digitize and email me.

Cost to scan and digitize from the railroad historical society: $10

Cost to scan and digitize from the State Archives: $80

Yes, I paid the $80 because I needed the drawing, but this price variance is a bit insane. I've made sure that the scale model manufacturer understands the costs associated with providing the drawings and they will reward my efforts appropriately.

Craig Fuller said, on Freightwaves on the first day the Kalmbach acquisition was announced, that he was expecting to establish 'a [resemce in Wisconsin' for the acquired business. That did not include a number of Kalmbach Media's buildings, notably in particular the one which housed the servers used for the Kalmbach forums. That building had to be 'evacuated' not later than July 15th, and I suspect at least some of the recent site outages and problems were associated with moving the equipment (or changing hosting to VMs in the cloud or something else 'virtual')

I would presume that research materials used for the publications -- digital or print -- would likely be moved to whatever new facility Firecrown sets up.

As someone who developed a 'broadcast model' for streamed digital media rights protection (on the principle of free-to-record radio broadcast 'resolution'), I think one answer to the photograph quandary is to produce 'free' versions of the images, at comparatively low resolution and with digital watermarking. Rights to the high-resolution images could be handled with more restrictions or cost. It would be fun, of course, to have a full 'railroad preservation' equivalent of Shorpy, but the usual business models including those for the 'photo-trading' industry in railfanning, may not facilitate that.

Regarding if Kalmbach kept the negatives/prints they published in TRAINS: I always thought their policy was to not keep said negative or print, and in my one experience getting a photo published, they did return my slide. Thus - how much of a photo library does Kalmbach have?

There have been a few authors/publishers rumored to be Black Holes where slides/prints never were returned, due to unexpected passing, being overwhelmed, etc. - and a few have been mentioned on this thread - but I never heard that being an issue with Kalmbach.

When I wrote my Frisco steam book, I contacted a nice lady at the California Museum library inquiring about Beebe-Clegg Frisco material. They have the negative collection there. She sent me a list and thumbnails of what they have. I was able to purchase 600dpi scans of the negs, which they emailed to me. An aside, Beebe did a terrible job preserving his negs as opposed to Clegg. Scratches, light leaks, spots. I was able to make them usable with a lot of Photoshop Elements work and used quite a few in the book. I think it was $15 to publish each one. The publisher covered that.
So I won't speak ill of the museum library there, they were very accommodating.
I made the effort to identify any photographer that I knew in the book. That was always a pet peeve of mine,"Collection of" credit line even when the photographer is known.

I'll second that. CSRM staff have done a couple of helpful scans in support of various research projects.

On an unrelated note, I've donated a few items to the collection.

Our reproduction prices are based on covering basic costs of staff time and materials as well as processes. Nobody makes a profit on these services but we also don't want to lose our shirts either. The bottom line is achieving a balance between making the collections accessible while covering basic costs. This may vary depending on your mileage.

K.R. Bell
Railroad Collections Archivist
PA State Archives (PHMC)

I’m a little confused - doesn’t the state pay for your salary, equipment, etc.?

Crescent - Zephyr said...

"I’m a little confused - doesn’t the state pay for your salary, equipment, etc.?"

I have worked for two different government agencies… In both cases there was government funds received, but also a goal for revenue generated. In one, a California city, other departments (for example building inspection) were expected to generate all of their revenue and fee schedules in place to do that. In another agency, we discussed recovering the cost of providing the service, not including in that cost staff labor, or building costs… so only reproduction and shipping costs. These decisions are made by (or at least approved by) your elected officials (based on or in opposition to staff recommendations.)

I have seen some really crazy fees, ussually from a small historical society where a director (or directors) believe that their collection can generate revenue. In some cases, they were hiding photo collections while they wrote/edited an Arcadia type which they could sell to generate revenue.

Legitimate expenses can be significant… particularly when dealing with drawings which have to be sent off site to be scanned or copied. Scans of photos have helped reduce costs over making copy negatives and prints as was done in the past.

I would also like to acknowledge the California State Railroad Museum Library, which is and always has been wonderful…