The Form 19 train orders for the steam excursion trip that was run by the Cleveland Railroad Club with B&O 421(heavy 2-8-2 Mikado) in May of 1958 have been donated to Midwest Railway Preservation Society in Cleveland. We would like to frame these and display them for public viewing at the MRPS ex B&O Roundhouse. These are flimsy tissue carbon paper copies that were issued to the Engineer who carefully saved them for all of these years in a folder. I have no experience with preserving these so if anyone else has done this I would appreciate your input. Certainly mounting them on acid free paper is needed, what about some kind of glass that would stop them from fading due to exposure to light? Perhaps we can only photo copy them and display the copies.

Does anyone know if this trip was the last steam operation on the B&O, at the very least it probably was the last steam powered passenger train. One newspaper article that came with the flimsies stated that thousands of people were turned away because the capacity of the sold out train was around 800!

Does anyone have photos of this trip?

In my opinion these are too fragile to put out for display, either directly 'in a frame' or exposed to light and changing environmental conditions.

I'd make a good color scanned copy (which will inherently reproduce any shadow effects of the weave or 'crumpling' of the flimsies in ambient light), then do any color correction (for correct appearance in daylight) and print them. You might still want to use 'non-glare' picture glazing, with some kind of UV barrier to preclude long-term fading of the dyes in a print, since some of the long-term aging characteristics even of 'archival' inkjet or dye-sub inks isn't really established. And keep the scanned files for reference, so you have to access the originals as seldom as possible even for 'reprinting'.

Use full archival protection on the individual sheets -- keep them separated with clean, acid-free, etc. tissue stock, in a closed case, in controlled temperature and atmosphere.

There is someone in NE Ohio who has a full slide or PowerPoint program on the last B&O steam excursion. I can't remember his name, and unfortunately the Akron RR Club Wordpress blog archive can't be searched the way I need to find it, but he put on the program for the club in the past couple of years. I would try and find him and see if he would be willing to share his images with the chapter.

Yes, that was the last steam-powered "train" to operate on the B&O as a B&O train. Locomotive 421 was kept operable at the W. 3rd St. roundhouse for several months after that to provide house steam, and regularly moved under it's own power down to the ash pit and coal dock. There are existing photos of those moves as well. I've seen them, it's been a long-time, and I can't remember where I saw them. But they did exist.

Check the book "B&O Power" If you drive to Holloway, Ohio today you would be hard pressed to believe how big of coal yard that once was ! Nothing but a large weed patch today.

Kevin Kohls