New By-Pass track Operational

Jersey steam · **Posted:** Mon Jan 12, 2015 1:07 pm

To get this post back "on track", could you submit a map or drawing of exactly where this track was placed. I Google Earth viewed it and couldn't figure out were the second photo was taken.

Bernie Perch

robertmacdowell · **Posted:** Tue Jan 13, 2015 3:54 am

Alexander D. Mitchell IV wrote:

Today, while working "behind the scenes" at my Friendly Neighborhood Railroad Museum, we received:
1) a phone call asking for local transit help;

We get frequent calls "I'm at a railroad crossing. Is it yours? You're all I could find on Google." I've learned to say "Do you see a sign near the crossing that shows an 800 number?"

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2) an e-mail from someone who apparently sent his query to completely the wrong museum in completely the wrong field; and

Spam.
A lot of foamers, particularly the slightly mentally ill ones, operate on the belief that email is free, and they can send unlimited amounts without concern for the cost of doing so. Specifically the cost of your time. They deserve care of response proportional to their care of query, which in spam is nil.

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3) opened a handwritten letter from someone who apparently wrote two places and put the letters in the wrong envelopes, asking about history and rolling stock at a local station museum in another state (they have no rolling stock, and near as I can tell they're closed due to financial difficulties).

Two? Probably wrote 200. Still, handwriting and a stamp signifies somewhat more care-of-query, but still not a whole lot. In a volunteer context it boils down to: is responding fun?

Also https://gma.yahoo.com/12-old-wrote-lett ... ories.html

Either way, my notion is this: If you're going to prepare a personal response, why not generalize it to add to your website, so it also intercepts all such future queries. Unless you need some sort of hands-on curatorship of the query itself, the way librarians like to reshelf so they know which books people pull off the shelves. But then you have web logs for that.

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The guy who read the letter couldn't even read the name of the place he was asking about. He brought it up to me; I instantly figured it out (a very oddball name, to be sure), and in 15 seconds had photos and a history of the building--because I had the right websites bookmarked. Thank you again, http://www.rrshs.org/.

There's a website for that! (sharing your bookmarks)

There's a website for that too! (getting people to search the internet for you). Yahoo Answers is a free example, and at other sites you can pay a couple bucks to get someone to do 10 minutes of googling.

Have I mentioned the Mechanical Turk?