There are many heartening stories of why various types of artifacts
are preserved with the arena of railroad preservation. However, I thought it would be worthwhile to offer a glimpse at the other side. That would be material that was willfully destroyed by its' owners-for perhaps a very good reason.

A very sad example of the latter behavior was revealed when I got to see the 'Inside EMD' slide show mentioned in an earlier post. It seems that the destruction of the EMD plant was accompanied by the destruction by a HUGE archive of sales-related material relating to EMD locomotives. This material dated from the onset of EMD's existence until very recent times.
While a small number of 'liberators' were able to squirrel away small lots on the q.t., the bulk of it got tossed in the trash.

Sad to say, the 'why' is quite simple. The parent company has been the subject of numerous lawsuits-none inconsequential in scope or size. So, in order to to limit the amount of material available to a plaintiffs attorney during the discovery phase of a trial, GM ordered the material destroyed.
To a stakeholder, this would be appear to be 'good corporate governance.'
At the same time, to a historian-perhaps a recipe for disaster ?

Comments ?

Another case history - Glover Machine Works. In short, Cobb County purchased the property for the use of the public utilities department, and set aside $250,000 for preservation. The preservation funds were barely touched as the buildings were being demolished, and the majority of the fabric of the plant and almost all of its remaining records were lost as a result. It took many years for a plan to be developed to enlarge the museum in Kennesaw which now houses the tiny percentage that was salvaged. The displays in the Kennesaw museum, while nice, bear only peripheral resemblance to the real works, not because of the loss of content entirely, but because of the cleanliness and "like new" appearance of the tools, etc which were mostly well used when acquired by Glovers.

The amount of the property which was actually put to use by Public Utilities is minimal - just a tiny corner. The brick structures could have been saved and a museum developed in part of them, the rest adaptively reused as have been the old furniture factory buildings near the square.

Franklin Garrett, an Atlanta historian and preservationist, used the term "Municipal Vandalism" to describe this sort of activity.

dave

It's the age old problem that "one man's trash is another man's treasure".

After one of our retirees passed away, his son brought me several boxes of company records that he found squirreled away in his father's basement. Turns out they were the same files I personally pitched in the trash almost twenty years ago. This time we extracted some of the more interesting records for preservation.

I am familiar with at least one class 1 railroad that permitted a trusted and sympathetic officer to extract files for archives maintained by a relevant historical association. The only condition was that files containing personnel matters had to be destroyed. The historical association has thus been blessed with over a tractor trailer load of paper records which are now being cataloged.

Alan Maples

The best way to save these things is to be present. Get in there, make it happen. You cannot rely on an an agency or corporation to do it.

Case in point, a museum in PA is selling CDROMs with thousands of archival photos from the abandoned Bethelehm Steel plant in Bethlehem. By forging relationships (pun intended) they were able to preserve this archive.

I knew a Steel company photographer very well, and am pleased as pie his work is preserved.

This is also a lesson when it comes to documenting sites with no future. Yes, HAER and HAB do it well, but you can do it, too. Maybe better now int he digital age.

Ask, try, and be present. I have seen and documented many now-gone railroad and industrial sites by doing just that.

The challenge I have is to make my own body of material accessible as appropriate.

Rob

The important point of the first post is that corporations now are destroying their old records instead of donating them to museums or historical societies for fear of these being used against them by lawyers in the future. We have seen this also at the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis. We got a freight car not too long ago which had been rebuilt by a short line in the 70s. We were curious which railroad was its original owner and what it looked like before the rebuild, so we approached them looking for the records of the work. We found that their corporate parent had directed all such records be destroyed some time before for fear of future legal actions. So, we now have only a part of the history of this car. This is a minor point as regards this car, but does represent a future where historians will not have many company records to work with, and we all will be the poorer for it. If you are offered old records in the future and can't handle them, please let others know who might be able to take them, as these offers may be drying up. Just another cost of being a lawsuit happy society.

The loss of the Glover plant was a real tragedy. I saw it on a TV show about antiques some years ago, not long before it was razed. Though just a minor locomotive builder, it would have been a good place to gather and display the few remaining Glover engines, a real trip back in time.

Just before the Central Vermont Railway was sold to that @#$$%** bunch from Texas in 1995, they hired a trash company to come in and clean out all the company records, some of which went back to the 1840s. Fortunately, one dispatcher/historian on the graveyard shift was able to go down at night and pick through the best of it for the local historical society, and I scavenged the remaining drawings, etc. from the enginehouse for him.

Unfortunately, most companies today are run by sleazeballs who are only interested in saving their own slimy skin, so the more tracks they cover the less trouble they will get into. The days of pride in the company are long gone. One solution would be to send them to China to work as laborers in the factories they have sent overseas....

As somewhat with a foot in both the preservation world and the legal world, I think I may be able to shed some light on the issue. It isn't always a "sleaze ball" reason why companies sometimes decide to destroy records. Believe it or not, not everyone in the corporate or legal world is some slimy person who has the main goal of firing everyone, suing everyone else, and making everything in China. I think there are several reasons why company records are destroyed, each of them is entirely reasonable.

1. To the average person or even executive, records are rather mundane items. It may not occur to the executives that records, even dating back to the 1840s are worthwhile. After all, a company's main responsibility is to its shareholders, owners, and employees. Often executives don't understand the value of such items. Companies often spend a lot of money on professional storage for company records. When it gets down to that bottom line, it often makes sense to destroy records, throw them away, or just get rid of them, than take the time to contact a historical society or archive ready to take and care for the records. Think about it on a personal level. Do you still have every canceled check that you ever wrote? How about every letter you received, bill you paid, and legal document you signed? Probably not, a lot of it has gone through the shredder over the years. I doubt any of us would consider our daily documents as being historical and worthwhile. However, historical societies are full of documents, journals, and other personal records from individuals. These persons, however, only represent a few, and probably a bad cross sampling at that. At that, I think it is reasonable that a reasonable company executive would feel the same way about old company documents.

2. When dealing with company legal records, the attorney client privilege comes into play. A couple of issues that one needs to remember involve the privacy of information. I read an article in the American Bar Association journal recently that discussed the confidential nature of the attorney-client relationship. The privacy afforded attorneys and their clients includes what we term the "work product" (letters, memos, etc). The privacy of the relationship extends forever. It doesn't matter that the client may be dead, or even the attorney and client are both long gone. William Thomas, when he wrote "Lawyering for the Railroad" encountered this problem. There are some firms still around that date to the 19th century. Many of them did work for railroads. It is hard ethically for a firm to allow such historical research into what is essentially privileged information, no matter how useless or unimportant today.

3. One of the most often requested questions I know the University of Louisville Archives department got in regard to their collection of L&N records involved personnel files. Employee files are (I think) covered by Federal law, and because of the many privacy issues, a company usually destroys the old files after a certain amount of time.

4. What do you do with them once you get the records? The Kentucky Railway Museum received the remaining records of the Kentucky and Indiana Terminal Railroad when the company moved out of its offices in Louisville. They now sit in a Milwaukee Road refer. It takes a lot of money, and space to have a decent records collection. Then, once you have it, how many people will use it for historical research? The University of Louisville has one man, a former L&N employee who works with the L&N records. He volunteers 2 days a week, and has done so for 15 years, and only now is starting to get the records into order. What is even more amazing is that the majority of these records are just from the public relations department. Everything else was trashed, or shipped off to Jacksonville when CSX closed the L&N building in Louisville.

I think the best way to approach the issue is to try to find out in advance if XYZ company is going to destroy records. Have an appropriate organization, such as a museum, library, or archive approach the company and ask if that organization can take possession of certain records. It is at least worth a try.

Haven't the Chinese got enough problems? Decades of communism, and being hungry again a half hour after every meal. Besides, we need somebody out there capable of making inexpensive new steam.

There is a balance in the universe which will rebound on these people in its own time. They just seem to want to dig themselves in deeper and deeper....not to mention the utter bleakness of existing in the fear-driven world they have created for themselves.

dave

It is with regret, that I agree with the other people in this debate. You can not save EVERYTHING related to XYZ railway company,etc, but we should try and get a broad sample. The next question has to be, Where do we put it? Plus, where is the financial resources going to come from to manage and store these items? Another concern (which is related to the above) To-day Colleges are not turning out grads with degrees in Railway Archival Management. Lots to think about.

Anyone want to chime in about the Colonie Shops? I unexpectedly stopped there several years ago. There was still several pieces of equipment stored in it at that time, and the place was literally brimming with file cabinets filled with blueprints, ledgers on all kinds of Alco loccomotives, and D&H correspondence. I met a party from the Wacamaw (sp?) Coast RR who was looking at buying an Alco switcher and he and another loco dealer from Connecticut who were astounded at the items just laying around. Some of the file cabinets were literally left outdoors in the elements, and it appeared that homeless people were using the papers from within them to start their fires.

As usual, most of what I wanted to say here has already been said, and much more eloquently than I could have. However, three personal examples for consideration in my few years as a curator/archivist/registrar/step-and-fetch-it:

1.) When a certain class one stopped using carfloats to ship its railcars between Port Huron and Sarnia in 1994, the records were stored, for a time, in the company's former Port Huron depot. One day I received a call from a "new" female clerk who had just bid the job, and was told to get rid of the records. She called me first --- and sadly, I wasn't there --- but left a message. I got the message, rushed down there, only to find that a "supervisor" had decided to call the lawyers. They, in turn, instructed the staff to send the record to a "storage" facilty in Livonia. For those of us in the know, there is no storage there --- there is only and incinerator, hence many of us in the know calling it "the Livonia burning facility." Long story short, after a tyraid by yours truly about how a company could hate its own history, the next day I found a REFRIGRATOR box stuffed with said records --- dropped on our doorstep. A single note attached "Your comments hit home --- please take care of these." Almost a complete set of the records, including seniority rosters, of the companies carferry operations since th their resumption since the 1950's. ---
Lesson 1: act fast, stay local.

2.) A similar set of circumstances with another Class One's car shops --- local employees delivering boxes of records. Sadly, we were beaten to the earliest records by another museum in the state ---- who not only had been more vocal years before, but had someone on the inside.
- Lesson 2: Speak up early and often, before someone else does.

3.) A phone call from a lady whose father had passed, and had "a bunch of old stuff" to get rid of from her father who "had sailed the Lakes". On going over to see the "stuff" , I hit upon a huge treasure trove of papers relating to the Wyandotte Chemical Company and it freighters --- including seamen's papers for many different gentlemen, and a complete set of b/w photos of every freighter/ ship the company owned, as well as complete "fit out" list of their ships from the 1920's through the 1960's.
-- Lesson 3: Never ignore the little old ladies --- they my just be holding "an old cup" that turns out to be the Holy Grail.

TJG

2.) A similar set of circumstances with another Class One's car shops --- local employees delivering boxes of records. Sadly, we were beaten to the earliest records by another museum in the state ---- who not only had been more vocal years before, but had someone on the inside.
- Lesson 2: Speak up early and often, before someone else does.

If I read correctly TJ, these records were preserved and not at your expense. Sounds like a beneficial set of circumstances to me, or do you have a huge grant for archival work you need to use up before it disappears?

dave

On the other end of the scale, some railroad companies have gone to great lengths to preserve their companies' records, though admittedely this is the exception than the rule. For the past year, I have been processing on a pro bono basis the Strasburg Rail Road Company's historic archives collection. On loan to the Railroad Museum of PA, I have been taking a filing cabinet of "stuff" (i.e. photographs, newspaper clippings, record files, negatives, oversized materials, films, audio tapes, etc.) and putting everthing into original order by creator and thereunder by subject and processing everything with acid-free materials, melinex sleeves, etc., and creating a finding aid. I am indebeted to Linn Moedinger, President of the Strasburg RR, who had the foresight to make preservation of this historical treasure a priority and funding same to make it all happen. Processing should be completed by the end of the year. It makes a huge difference when the company supports preservation initatives and then backs one up with the resources to make it all happen.

The image of heroic employees saving corporate history in the face of opposition from the moronic acts of management may happen, but the opposite problem has been just as prevalent. I once worked for a major Class I that, decades before my arrival, deposited several thousand cubic feet of records with an esteemed research library. I spent two years in operations until a recession eliminated my department. Rather than being laid off like many of my colleges, I was exiled to the Records Management warehouse. As the railroad consolidated agencies, shops and offices, records came flowing into headquarters. To stay afloat, the corporation needed to sell real estate. As a result, records that could be kept in unheated, no-cost buildings, now came to a high-cost urban facility. Yes, we enforced the required retention schedule, but we pulled out items of interest for future donation to the archives at the research library. We found however, that that facility would not accept more corporate materials, as they were at capacity. Moreover, my predecessor had labeled about sixty bankers boxes “SAVE-HISTORIC MATERIALS.â€

I've mentioned before that I have a lot of WA&G, C&PA, BR&P and NH&IR records available to any worthy oragnization that can do a better job with them than taking up space in my house. So far, no one even has the space to store them, let alone the time to see what they are!

The NH&IR stuff is the most complete, the others are mostly tariffs.