I've downloaded Volumes 90 through 97 (1916 through 1923) cost free and would like very much to get more for free, especially for the year 1927 if RME existed that late. (Don't know when it was absorbed.)

Anybody know if other volumes besides these are available free on line?

What you're seeing is an entity like archive.org or Google Books making the scanned versions available when copyright on them expires, or some other permission is secured. See here for a chart showing why 1923 is in, but later volumes may not be:

http://patentpending.blogs.com/patent_p ... a_cop.html

or, for more than you probably ever wanted to know:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/

Or, for the US Copyright Office (at the Library of Congress) directly:

http://www.copyright.gov

The gist of the discussion is that works from 1923 back are automatically in the public domain, and snyone can use them, but some works from 1923 won't be available until 2019, works from 1924 not until 2020, and so on.

The situation also hinges, in part, on whether copyright for the magazine was properly renewed on the appropriate rolling 28-year-term basis in the intervening years. Someone would have to search the copyright records to see if this was done. If not, a larger range of issues could be digitized (and a request to a digitizing project like Google's might produce the necessary work).

BTW: for all questions relating to copyright, the 'official' US Copyright Office number (from copyright.gov/help/) is 1-877-476-0778

There is also a specific link to making a search to establish if a given work is in copyright:

http://www.copyright.gov/forms/search_estimate.html

Not exactly... IIRC, the revision of the Copyright law that happened during the seventies automatically granted extensions to works that had previously been under Copyright, whether the owners applied for the extension or not. Therefore, for works published after 1922 that had once been under Copyright, unless someone specifically placed the work in the public domain, it isn't. At least we are finally coming to the point where Copyrights will start to expire again... unless Disney lobbies Congress for yet a further extension to protect "the mouse."

Thank you both for the information. The information in the links looks to be something to dig into......when I'm well rested.

I'm 84. The mass of interesting articles just in the volumes downloaded so far will no doubt keep me well supplied with locomotive engineering matters to muse over for whatever time I have left, so no problem, really.

Still, I figure that the 1927 volume surely had something on the New York Central Hudson. That would be nice to see!

Where did you download them?

I'm not sure where I found the first few, as it was quite a while ago, but the last several I found at archive.org. I think in most cases I just typed Railway Mechanical Engineer Vol (# in question) into Google. Sorry for the tardy reply.