I need some help in determining the value or lack there of of about 80 magazines. The first is Railroad Magazine Sept 47 and April 48. There are roughly 40 of these in this time frame. The second is Railroad Stories march 35 and april 35. There are roughly 40 of these in the 30's. The condition is fair. Contents are amazing, from stories to mechanical details to articles on long forgotten rail lines and interurbins.
Any help would be appreciated.
Don Grant

As strictly a comparison, RailPub.com is offering these issues at $4-6 each in presumably good condition; it's anybody's guess if he has any takers. I, on the other hand, once managed to snag almost a complete set from 1946 to 1958 for probably $12 total over several lots at the "right" auction back in the late 1980s (right for me, wrong for the seller).

As a rule, the used magazine market has taken a true "bath" since the Internet became popular. The railfans who would have been buying these "collectibles" years ago now simply find the information they seek online, and see many shelf feet of heavy paper as a liability rather than an asset. It may not be too long before someone subsidizes the scanning of a complete set for online and/or computer disc archive--it certainly won't be done for profit, as with the Trains and MR complete sets now on DVD.

Perhaps it could be included in Google books archive? It would be available to all who need information.

fk

Another option would be to digitize them and share them (assuming the copyright has expired) on something like Scribd.

I would hesitate to do that for one simple reason: Railroad Magazine, relative to Trains, Railfan, etc., was a horrible reference and information source. If you scanned the contents of all the issues, the signal-noise ratio would be terrible.

Let me go grab a random issue: June 1940: Cover, two full-page ads for Listerine (as a hair-care product!) and LaSalle Extension University (correspondence school), table of contents, three more pages of ads, a story on the L&N "Hook & Eye Division" (11 pages, in a style that wouldn't pass muster today except in a small county historical society bulletin); cartoon, "New Railroad Movies" (3 publicity stills, one page), four pages on Baldwin 60,000, a page of "Sandbox Verse" poetry, ten pages on operating SP's Shasta Division, 26 pages on a fiction story (with ads), half-page on painting RR streamliners "on the Run" and half-page ad for Pepsi-Cola; four pages on model railroading (right-of-way signs), 3 pages of model club news and trading post (remember, this is 1940, and Model Railroader was still new); then six pages of photos and "ask us" Q&A section; six pages of photos, four pages of excursion listings and write-ups, then 27 pages of more fiction and "true tales of the Rails" anecdotal tales; 3 pages of Part 2 of NYC loco roster (2-8-2, 2-8-0)....... and it goes downhill from there. Photo reproduction is lackluster at best and horrible at worst, being halftone on now-yellowed newsprint pulp.

Look, if you're researching, or trying to preserve, the "Old Hook & Eye,' you definitely want this issue, even if the write-up in Trains years later was better. But in all honesty, I end up going to back issues of Railroad Magazine at one-one-hundredths the rate I go to Trains, Railfan, PTJ, or even Railpace or Railway Age.

The big problem with those old Railroad magazines is the cheap paper they were printed on. It's not quite like trying to read a papyrus from King Tut's tomb, but those old pulp pages have to be handled with care. Another quibble about Railroad of those days was that they'd have a nice cover illustration that had nothing to do with anything inside; as a boy I bought one because the cover showed a Pacific Electric 1619-class freight motor (just like the ones I saw going by my house every day), but there wasn't a word about PE inside that issue.