Just a heads-up that Tribune Media Services, the bankrupt-or-close-to-it owner of several newspapers, has started plundering their long-disused photo archives for sale fodder:

http://stores.ebay.com/tribunephotos

Yes, you can find railroad and transit photos. A LOT of chaff to sift through, and high prices, and a LOT of badly-misidentified stuff, but an astute archivist may find some jewels worth adding to a museum library or archive.

This might be the time to approach your local newspaper(s) and ask politely and diplomatically if there exists any possibility of acquiring whatever may lie in their file drawers in the basement before there's a "fire sale" or the stuff is scattered hither and yon. The days when they would just donate the files to the local museum are now long gone.

They have been selling on Ebay for a couple years now.

Is a wire photo just a normal photo or a haltone image?

Richard Wilkens

A wirephoto is a photo transmitted over wire by facsimile machines that were early versions of what later became an everyday office machine. Newspapers, wire news services and police agencies used them.

Steve

For the record, I've been able to identify specific photos in the Baltimore Sun archives sale as original prints from local negatives, not wire photos.

It helps to look on the backs.

If I'm correct, this image: http://cgi.ebay.com/CT-Photo-Chicago-Bu ... 3cb7838e9b
is of one of the cars of the "Train of the Goddess's", now at IRM.

Jeff

One word of caution here: Read the disclaimers on the sale documents! You are purchasing only the actual print itself, not the copyright to the print! In most cases you do not have the right to re-use, digitize, or reprint the photo for any purpose. It is, essentially, only for framing and hanging on your train room wall. -- Ray