Those who didn't know him might vaguely remember seeing his name as a credit line here or there. Those that knew him knew him as one of the warmest, friendliest, most generous rail enthusiasts they'd ever met.

Kenneth G. Murry, 75, died in a fire at his Mountville, Pa. home Monday night.

http://lancasteronline.com/news/local/f ... b2370.html

Regrettably, like a great many railfans and historians, his "collections" were described as "hoarding," and firefighters were unable to safely enter the burning building.

http://www.wgal.com/news/susquehanna-va ... e/25261526

That "hoard" included a lifetime collection of local history, his own photography, railroad artifacts, toy and model trains, and many works of railroad art, including a number of works by Grif Teller, the PRR calendar artist. (Some of those may have been in the Railroad Museum of Pa. at the time.)

He will be missed.

Trying to not be a cold hearted opportunist, but having seen an image of some of the house's contents spilled on the lawn, will anyone be able to save or salvage the worthwhile material, railroadiana, lanterns, steam relics (assuming some remain)?

A sad loss for the Pennsy community.

A loss for the preservation community and a reminder to protect valuable artifacts, lest they be permanently lost.

This is horrible, both for Ken and his collection. As a coincidence, yesterday we had a steel shipping container delivered to the museum and much of the collection that I have here in our wooden house will soon be relocated to the steel unburnable container. A lot of the stuff that we have in our homes made of kindling is irreplacable. Let this be a warning to get it to a safer location.

Brother Murry was well known and closely allied, if discretely, with the RR Museum of Pa., the Lancaster Chapter NRHS, and the PRRT&HS, as well as other groups both rail and non-rail. (I have already heard anguished cries from the postcard-collecting community.) I am fairly confident that a wide circle of both close friends and relatives are at work doing what they can to assess, stabilize, and administrate the situation as appropriate.

I also regret to say that this is hardly the first "hoarding" situation of this ilk I have seen in the rail preservation community. I've been in at least four "collectors'" houses where one could only navigate up one side of the staircase(s) because half or more of the stairs was occupied with "clutter" awaiting sorting. In one particular case, I arrived at the estate for what was the third of what turned into nine separate days of sorting and trashing; the house was so full of everything from forty-year-old expense accounts to city histories to consulting reports to dead relatives' clothing to erotic fetish attire to who-knows-what that they had already filled up two roll-away dumpsters. As soon as I started actually DIGGING into file boxes, I found, to our utter chagrin, that "jewels" had been buried with "trash," and there was no telling how many builders plates, irreplaceable photos and documents, books, etc. had been inadvertently trashed the first two days. I ended up with the sole job of sorting through file boxes and passing judgement as to whether to trash or hold for further examination. I'm told that simply the builder's plates we discovered and decided not to keep have brought over $9,000 so far......

Knowing the stupid high prices builders plates fetch these days, why were any of them rejected? Or were you only accepting what fit your collection and not taking any to sell?

The guy left everything--and I mean EVERYTHING--to one institution, which with I occasionally work, and they have a rather specific collection focus and mission statement. I honestly don't know what all the stuff in question was, but I became livid that one supposed plate was the perfect trading fodder for something someone else has/had that I want, and I never heard about that plate until it was supposedly already sold, whereas I could have offered money for it to get the one I want...... all I really know is that, to make up an example completely out of whole cloth, the Railroad Museum of Pa. has no use for a German or Czech locomotive builder's plate, nor would the B&O Railroad Museum have a use for Swiss or Japanese trolley plates, or the Illinois Railway Museum a Thai rickshaw.....

But Nick will take it.

Worse news, from someone closely sourced to the situation:

I think most of us know at least one fan with a similar situation. I know of an older fan who lost his house and collection because of a busy-body neighborhood improvement person who had the city condemn his house (he really should have gotten out long before, he couldn't take care of it after his parents died), and then took a long trip up that river called Denial before they showed up with a bulldozer and gave him 10 minutes to take what he could carry - which wasn't much! Irony was, he had been offered help by younger fans who had previously arranged for people with trucks and places to store stuff to get it out, but he said things would work out, he wasn't going to give up control of his collection. Of course "things" just don't work out on their own.

Perhaps the hobby, maybe any hobby, attracts personalities with a disposition towards these behaviors? I don't know. I do know that you can't save someone from themselves, unless they want the help. So, I guess we will continue to occasionally hear about tragic events like this.

A friend of mine who was once one of the top collectors of a certain type of railroadiana/industrial artifact did, indeed, notice how "collecting" can easily and readily get out of hand, and recommended to me and others a book titled "Collecting: An Unruly Passion" by Werner Munsterberger: http://www.amazon.com/Collecting-Unruly ... 0156002531 . It tends to wade deep into "psycho-babble," but if anyone really wants to psychoanalyze folks like the ones described here and help them before the next bulldozer or scrapper shows up, it will probably help.

Of course we're hardly alone in this. Beanie Babies. Cabbage Patch Dolls. "Crazy cat ladies." People who fly across the country to add one rare bird to their spotting list. Motorcycle and parts collectors. Beer/wine bottle/can/label (or tasting notes) collectors. Costumers or quilters with a basement full of fabric and swatches.

A helpful approach to this mentality is to impress upon folks the bitter reality that, if we really care about history and preservation, we are not owners, but mere temporary custodians, and that if we care about a resource, from a book to a planet, we have to care for it and be ready to pass it to the next generation. This does nothing, of course, for the folks that would be perfectly happy to "take it with them" and be burned in a pyre of their stuff after they die, but........

Indeed. If not for their collection, to trade or sell for something. That's where having good connections pays off. Get the stuff you're not interested in cheap and market it to the folks that want it for the bucks if you have the place to store it.

Hell, that's happened to museum entities. No names mentioned. I know OERM and ORM have both made specific labor to "clean up" the appearance of their site to the outside world, and I am sure municipal "encouragement" had everything to do with that.


Here are completely different things:
1. Being a railfan.
2. Having a lot of stuff.
3. Hoarding (too much stuff of value)
4. Filth (cat turds, moldy pizza crusts, trash all over the floor).

Being a hoarder has nothing to do with having a lot of stuff. It's about how you care for that stuff - which is a reflection of self-esteem and obsession. A guy whose entry hall lined with Banker's boxes to the point where you can't even open your front door all the way, there is something seriously wrong with that.

Contrast with another guy with the exact same collection. He makes the effort to move into a bigger house, or get an outbuilding built, puts in racks for storage, so everything's neat and safe, the living areas of his home are presentable, his house is safe to drag a fire house through. Nobody accuses Jay Leno of being a hoarder, because as a collector, he's a class act.

To be a collector you have to take that extra step of also not being a hoarder.

Filth is different from clutter. You've seen the hoarding shows where the person just has too much stuff. Then, you've seen ones that are horrifying" cat turds, pizza crust, no hygiene, you want to break out the Tyvek suit and respirator because it looks like the bottom of a dumpster. That's what I mean by filth. Filth is NOT present in all hoarder situations. But social services assume that it is. They see the Bankers' Boxes stacked to the ceiling, they tell the firemen not to enter, they treat it like hazmat, pull kids out, and try to condemn.

If there's any tips to the low-level hoarders on this forum, it's "take pains to make your place fireman-friendly". Have the hoardy stacks only in the basement (away from the stairs) and in end-node rooms like back bedrooms. The main through and living spaces should be kept clear. That doctrine also makes your house presentable.

This thread certainly has been a wakeup call!

It may not meet all of the professional standards for climate controlled archival storage pace, but with a few precautions taken this storage container will do just fine as Youngstown Steel Heritage's temporary archives storage facility. It does not leak, won't catch on fire and is much more difficult to break into than my house.


We will be placing desiccants inside the container to control humidity, as well as placing certain restrictions such as not opening it on humid days and remembering to let it air out on warm, dry days. Fragile and mold prone documents will be stored in closed plastic tubs with desiccants as an added layer of protection.

The container, which has practically no rust, good door seals and hardly any dents and dings, was retired purely because it is 25 years old. I purchased it for $3,100 including delivery on a tilt deck trailer.

robertmacdowell: You may be giving too much credit to some collectors, or assume they have the resources to buy or maintain property/facilities necessary to properly keep a "collection", or the presence of mind to realize that they are either financially or psychologically unable to do so. I realize, although at times it seems to be, there is not a direct cause and effect relationship between hoarding and being a railroad enthusiast. There is this streak in some people in every avocation who must "save" everything they can in their chosen genre, and they consider themselves to be the only ones who can properly do so, regardless of whether or not they have the resources to properly care for those artifacts. It covers everyone from paper hoarders, to those with rusting equipment scattered around warehouses, sidings, and freight yards. Those are the people we hear about who "go down with the ship", so to speak. They can't help themselves, or listen to reason. We hear most about the ones who have managed to come into possession of something historically significant and valuable when they had more resources, and gradually lost their ability to maintain it, but not their will to hang onto it to the all too foreseeable bitter end. That most likely is the case with a certain person in Western PA that keeps coming up here, whose demise we are going to one day mourn, as we scorn the unreasonableness that will lead to the demise of his very large artifact.