So - about those articles!

I am a published author, mostly in research, but with a few bylines in "live steam" magazines. The question was raised, about the online articles section of RYPN, and why there is no new content since ~~ten years ago.

It takes time and serious effort to write something that others will really read, remember, and cherish. It takes a lot more effort than just writing a post on your laptop to RYPN before you fall asleep in bed. When I write something, a research paper for example, I put a lot of effort into finding a journal that will give my paper good exposure. I want my paper to reach a wide audience now, but more importantly, I want my paper to be accessible to readers as a reference 20-30 years into the future.

In most cases, the way you accomplish this is publishing in a quality, stable journal that has distribution in libraries, and is indexed on various library search engines. RYPN.org does not provide this, and so I will not write an article for RYPN. I am much more likely to write an article for our club magazine, in Danish, even though the circulation is less than 500, and not readable by non-Danish speakers. Why? The magazine comes out on paper, and is preserved in a few libraries. I am confident that if I write something for our magazine, my article will still be accessible to researchers and railfans in 50 years.

I suspect I am not alone. I suspect that many of the articles online in RYPN in the early years were attracted by the reputation of the print magazine of 30 years ago. As the memory of that magazine faded, the enthusiasm for contributing to RYPN.org also faded.

I propose that the solution is a return to a print magazine. The print version would not be the majority form of distribution, but the print copy would be the issue "of record" that would be retained by libraries and archived. Many persons would read the magazine online. The magazine could not be a commercial venture. It would have to be a labor of love by one of the larger museums, or perhaps a collaboration of multiple museums.

That is my position on preservation related articles.

A very good idea:

"I propose that the solution is a return to a print magazine. The print version would not be the majority form of distribution, but the print copy would be the issue "of record" that would be retained by libraries and archived. Many persons would read the magazine online. The magazine could not be a commercial venture. It would have to be a labor of love by one of the larger museums, or perhaps a collaboration of multiple museums."

Would the publication of Heritage Railway Alliance be a suitable medium for this? It already exists, it has an editor (who is probably looking for material), and your proposal for preservation of knowledge fits HRS's mission.

The printed version of the HRA journal is popular with HRA member organizations and their personnel. Perhaps this idea should be explored and developed.

Howard P.

I wrote ten articles for RyPN, for two reasons:

1) Nobody else would publish me. On RyPN, I could use as many photos as I wanted, and my content was not edited by somebody who did not know as much as I did about the subject. My text and pictures would display full screen, worldwide, for free, instantly, rather than being crammed into the odd spaces between ads in a magazine.

2) Hume Kading kept asking me to write more because RyPN would have a spike of visitors to the site of 20,000 to 30,000 or so, the day after one of my pieces was posted.

For the longest time, what I contributed has suffered cyber attrition --- The first three are completely vanished, the remainder have no cover page, and at least one mostly doesn't work anymore. I've wanted to fix these defects and make some corrections/updates but nobody has had time to fool with helping me since Hume got fed up and left.

There's plenty of talented, experienced, knowledgeable folks on RyPN. I personally would love to see more of them contribute here. The idea of publishing our articles section on paper appeals to me, but I think commercially it might be a dud. However, if it was online in one of those DIY print-your-own-copy type formats it might be practical. Better than twenty years ago, passengers from England and the EU on a charter I was working in Guatemala showed me their home made copies of my RyPN articles, although no legit commercial publication has ever shown any interest in anything I did. In the Mexican state of Morelos, my RyPN article on the Ferrocarril Introceanico was incorporated into the local school history classes. A few websites and other small publications have reprinted some of my pieces, while internet searches for the subjects I've covered often lead curious minds to the RyPN articles section.

Here is a link to the October 2022 issue.

Index:

The HeritageRail Alliance - Our First 10 Years
Recommended Practices for Railway Museums Part 5:Collections Stewardship
Rail Bikes today: The next big thing in tourist railroading.
On the road again
A brief history of the Union Pacific Museum
Patching a Budd corrugated roof
Restoring a runner
HeritageRail News (short project updates)
HeritageRail Alliance Commercial Member Directory

A magazine subscription is $25.

In addition to the Heritage Rail Journal, organization membership in the Alliance includes access to technical assistance and a library of reprinted technical materials.

Wesley

In addition to the several excellent options already posted, the NRHS is seeking articles for publication and given that their goal is to be the leaders on preservation, material that might suit RYPN audience would appear to be an excellent fit for NRHS.

But I can tell you that many of the authors you used to see published are getting quite old now, and writing on topics that require a lot of new research or interviews just does not fit well with age, travel, and health problems. In that perspective, articles that can be written directly from the author's own experiences are much more likely to get finished than subjects that involve a large investigative project.

PC

Yes, the one big advantage of the internet. Occasionally somebody will give you a blank page and let you put what you want on it.

Contrast with the much too common print publication experience of sending an article with the photos all carefully selected and captioned, and when the published article arrives, the editor has substituted photos by himself and his friends, with inadequate captions, that minimally support the article. Then when readers question the relevance of the substituted photos and captions, their questions get sent to the author to respond.

PC

I've never had that happen.

It sounds like two possible issues are in play:

1) The submitted photos were of inferior quality/composition, and the photos used instead made for a more aesthetically pleasing article in print;

2) The submitted photos were from archives that all demanded high fees for one-time publication rights with a for-profit publication, and substitutions were made to hold down costs. (I've had one instance where use of an archive's one relevant photo would have doubled the cost of an article, because the archive's fee rates were written with Time or Life Magazine in mind and only the prices were updated.)

And no, I won't discount the possibility of some editors' "ego trips" or favoritism towards their own work......

As a magazine editor, I can state that what we do is for the good of the magazine and for the enjoyment of our readers, and not done through any meanness.
A person sent me an article last year. In his submission, he said that he would not tolerate any aggressive editing. That was a bad start. It was a verbose piece. It would have been a 3-part article if published as sent.
I spent several hours on it and reduced the text to a reasonable, one-part article, trying diligently not to change the spirit of the piece. I then returned it to the writer. He was angry and said, you [moi] did exactly what I warned you not to do.
Have a nice day sir, and I hope you find someone who will publish your piece.
Any article can be greatly reduced through the removal of verbosity, redundancies, and information not backed by facts. You all might be surprised how much a submission can be pared down.
On the question of photos, my magazine primarily uses paid photographers, although I do like to have some "candid" photos from readers. Sadly, many people will send low resolution images that we cannot use, or the photos have to be used in a small format to avoid losing definition. We have skilled staff to work on photos, but even they cannot improve many, and it can be a painful process getting people to redo the photos and understand the size we need.
As mentioned in another post, photos pulled from proprietary sources, or from the internet are not acceptable, unless they are accompanied by clear permissions. An important purpose of a printed article or book is to have a lasting document, and not just a facsimile of what one can find on the internet.
A very important point to mention is that we are presently in a global paper crisis. Here in Canada, for instance, printers are having to source book and magazine quality paper from Europe -- we have no trees in Canada? The costs are rising precipitously. Obviously, that necessitates a firm hand in editing to keep the size manageable.
My advice to budding writers is keep it short and on point. This email, for example, is already too long, and many will not have read this far.
Go back over your work and ask yourself if a sentence or paragraph is essential to the story.
Editors will have many factors to weigh when preparing your article. They don't hate you! Really, they don't.

Ditto everything GW said about editing. I’ll add a bit more about images - almost a rant.

A large proportion of submitted images I’ve dealt with are simply not usable for commercial printing (printing with ink on paper). You can get away with a lot when publishing online since the images will be reduced in resolution to keep file size down and it still looks good on your screen. However, commercial printing is extremely picky when it comes to images. Your image resolution needs to be 300 dpi minimum at the size it will be printed. Otherwise, you run the risk that the printed image may look like crap. We can’t magically add pixels to a low resolution image. Preproduction will usually flag a low resolution image and ask if you really, really want to use it.

Take your time and think about the composition of your image when you’re shooting. At the minimum, consider the “Rule of Thirds” when composing your shot. It’s a simple concept. I won’t explain it here but you can Google it. We can usually fix exposure and color balance problems if the image is decent enough.

Don’t crop your images. We’ll do that if necessary. Well composed shots won’t require much cropping if any.

If you’re using an SLR camera indoors, please use a separate flash with either a diffuser and/or incorporate bounce flash meaning your flash is pointing obliquely at something, say, like the white ceiling in the room. This helps eliminate the stark shadows behind your subject and eliminates the “red eye” effect. A cheap diffuser is an index card taped to the back of your flash unit and folded at about 30 degrees over the flash which is pointing up at about 45 degrees. You can practice that at virtually no expense with a digital camera.

Cell phone images (oh, do I hate those) can be very problematic. The newer phones aren’t quite as bad. Try not to use the zoom if at all possible. Step up or step back instead and keep your fingers away from the lens. Don’t use any built in special effects. And for gawd’s sake, hold your phone sideways (landscape mode) unless absolutely necessary for the shot. Take the largest images your phone can do and send those.

Bracket your shots (take multiple images) and send the best one.

These simple concepts will help your photography in general.

Speaking as a virtually unknown, retired, working railroader, writing articles for RyPN based on my own experiences, Hume's editing was a cooperative process. There were no unpleasant surprises when my stories were released to our audience. Ten or twenty years later, I'd like to touch them up a little, and I'd love for the pictures to be reproduced a bit better. We did the best we could at the time with very little money spent.

In cases where my material has been reprinted, it was reproduced pretty much unaltered by niche publications of limited circulation, or on the railroad's website. As long as working railroaders approved of my efforts I was happy. Will I ever be in a hobby shop type publication ?? Not likely, but I think I'll live.

The former publisher of a print magazine had a reputation for substituting his own photographs because substituting his own photographs meant that he did not have to pay the author for use of the author's photographs.

The subject Preston is known for writing about is in the magazine's title.

In the digital age, this isn't so much of a problem, but what used to irritate me is that print magazines that would not run my pictures, usually did not return my originals (sometimes nagging them got results). Whether they wanted them for somebody's private stash, or they just wanted to make sure that nobody else published them, I never knew. But after awhile it resulted in my not sending my best photos for consideration.

Brother King alone has enough prospective articles to fill whole directories. All fascinating. There are many others in the preservation field whose contributions would be equally welcome.

I disagree that 'print standards' are critical to an 'articles' section in a forum like RyPN. The important thing is more to capture material that would otherwise be lost -- like essentially all of Mr. Cook's talks and narrated slide shows -- than to have perfect color images on coated stock expensively compiled for a select, implicitly well-heeled audience. The key is to have the material, edit it to make it readable (and compelling, if practical), and illustrate it effectively, probably in no small part with personal material rather than archive-quality 'images'.

I hate to admit this, but I'm partially to blame for why the articles section no longer works. When the site transitioined to our servers, we didn't offer Windows NT Server hosting options so the site ended up on one of our Linux servers. This worked just fine for any portions of the site written in PHP (such as these forums), but not at all for any parts that required Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP). This included the articles section.

In an effort to be a good steward of the site, I invested about $600 in a commercial software product (the name of which is lost in the mists of my aging memory), that allowed you to run Active Server Pages on a Linux server. It worked pretty good.

At that time, adding articles to the site was a purely manual project, and I never received any guidance as to how that might be done.

So the section languished. When my business failed in 2011 (may it rest in pieces) David Collison took over the hosting and as far as I can remember the site lived on (and continues to do so) a Linux server. ASP is ancient, and I'm not sure Microsoft even supports it anymore.

So some of the blame must lie with me.

It's funny how a magazine sometimes withers but then is brought back to life.