Hi friends,

I have two favors to ask of y'all...

First, our peers in the northeast and southeast have been providing some great content for the Briefs. In my own pursuit of the milk and anthracite roads, I also uncover a lot of northern news.

We have Boyd keeping the midwest news flowing, too.

What we haven't had much of is news from the great north woods, the far west or the southwest. Are you out there? We'd love to hear more...

Also, I am thinking that given the frequency of Interchange posts about the "lost" museums Magee/CP&W and Rail City that I will volunteer to make an on-going resource page so.

Hope there's steam in your spring,

Rob

rdavis@rypn.org

Rob brings up an interesting point. Very frequently here on the Interchange, we see the question "What happened to the (name a piece of equipment) that used to be at (name a location)?".
I know there are a few good databases of steam locomotives out there, but is anyone keeping track of all the other equipment? It would be a lot of work to document everything, but would be a good resource for a lot of folks in the preservation community looking for particular pieces of equipment for research and the like.

Boyd

bowens@rypn.org

> Rob brings up an interesting point. Very
> frequently here on the Interchange, we see
> the question "What happened to the
> (name a piece of equipment) that used to be
> at (name a location)?".
> I know there are a few good databases of
> steam locomotives out there, but is anyone
> keeping track of all the other equipment? It
> would be a lot of work to document
> everything, but would be a good resource for
> a lot of folks in the preservation community
> looking for particular pieces of equipment
> for research and the like.

> Boyd

Boyd: I agee that this is needed. Someone needs to start a list of, say, steam era box cars. A good place to start would be railroad museums. For instance, our museum has six box cars, most of which are used for storage. But whoever does it should list current condition including current paint scheme (or lack thereof)and whether the cars can be photographed or not.

Les Beckman (Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum/North Judson, Indiana)



midlandblb@cs.com

Interesting thread! My favorite quote below kind of speaks to this issue:

"Almost without exception the Locomotive is given the primary focus in railway museums. The rolling stock (freight and passenger) is too often considered secondary, when in fact it was the rolling stock that moved the people and the goods that, in turn, earned the revenue to pay the costs, including the cost of locomotive. Locomotives do not exist on their own, and we really have to balance our preservation of railway history, or future generations may think that trains only consisted of locomotives and cabooses." Garry Anderson, Executive Director, Canadian Museum of Rail Travel

Being pretty close to the "Great White North" as it were, there are two GTW auto cars I'd like to add to the list which are stacked away in Onaway, Michigan on an abandoned siding of the D&M. I've been trying to find someone to save at least one (they have the fairly unique end doors as well), but have not yet found anyone interested. Yes, I have thought of it for own museum, but we'd need space which don't currently have at the moment, and CN is still using the branch in front of our depot. Ah, maybe someday... anyway, both are in "GT" boxcar-red paint, with friction trucks I do believe.

TJG
> Boyd: I agee that this is needed. Someone
> needs to start a list of, say, steam era box
> cars. A good place to start would be
> railroad museums. For instance, our museum
> has six box cars, most of which are used for
> storage. But whoever does it should list
> current condition including current paint
> scheme (or lack thereof)and whether the cars
> can be photographed or not.

> Les Beckman (Hoosier Valley Railroad
> Museum/North Judson, Indiana)


Port Huron Museum
tjgaffney@phmuseum.org

I think we discussed a rolling stock database before, didn't we? IIRC correctly, some of the following came out of that discussion:

1. It would have to be free (i.e. an online database or webpage) since few people would pay for it.

2. It would be at tremendous amount of work; which someone who either has to do for free, or find sponsorship by the NRHS or some government agency.

3. If you don't have a "database master" overseeing it all, but make it a free-for-all, the possibility of duplicate data and errors would greatly reduce it's usefulness. (This may not have come out, but as one who has worked dozens of sources for years, I see it all time, and eliminate about a dozen duplicate entries each year. People also forget that the boxcar they thought they saw “a little while back” was in fact ten or twenty years ago and has been long gone.)

As you can imagine, after working on four steam databases for about eight years, this subject is near to my heart. I have been thinking about the subject of preservation databases a bit, and wanted to throw some thoughts out.

It is still my belief that the best and most powerful database to work with is on that resides on your computer, either as a database (Access, for example), or a CD-ROM. Searching and scrolling through the data is fast, and you can load it onto a notebook computer and take it with you. (This is assuming you are more than mildly curious, and are actively searching for say steam engines.)

Unfortunately, you have to charge something for the trouble of collecting all that data, placing it on a CD-ROM, and distributing it. But, as Greg Scholl noticed in my "Surviving World Steam News" posting, my sales to date have been between 100-200. He then stated it was “no surprise”; there just aren't enough people with enough interest in this topic to buy a copy. I think some of the printed directories have fared only a little better.

(I was going to release of surviving steam rolling stock worldwide, such as rotary snowplows, steam cranes and other MOW equipment, and steam logging equipment, but decided that too few people would see it to make it worth the effort.)

Also, unless you make updates available, a CD-ROM will almost immediately become obsolete, just like a book. That would mean more continued work for just an incremental return. Otherwise, you may as well go with printed material.

The alternative is to create a database or website on the Internet. This works pretty well, and Wes Barris and others have done a good job of developing and managing online databases. The cost of the hardware and software needed to build such a database, and the having it connected to an ISP 24 hours a day, is much less than it was when I started the “Surviving World Steam” Project eight years ago.

But online databases are not ideal either. Not all of them allow you to search and sort at will; many of them only allow you to drill down to a preprogrammed level. Response can be slow, how slow depends on your Internet connection and the speed of the database host. And that database is there only as long as the person or organization supporting it is willing or able to make it available; once it is gone, it is gone.

There is a database of tugboats online that was the basis of the Tugboats group on Yahoo. It was nearly lost altogether when Carl Wayne, the databaseÂ’s keeper, died suddenly. There is a group that has picked it up from WayneÂ’s widow, and it seems to be back fine now; but there are some other good websites (such as Michael PowellÂ’s China Railways website) that for one reason or another have moved or are gone for good, and the data lost. If you have the data on CD, and the author disappears, you can at least have continued access to the data, even though it will over time become obsolete.

Those of you who are members of Yahoo Groups may not have noticed it, but Yahoo groups have a Database section as well as Message and Photos sections. I didn’t make a bid deal out of it, but my “Steam Lizards” group on Yahoo was an experiment to see if I could offer a database of steam pumps worldwide and a collection of photographs online for free.

The “Steam Lizards” group really is another steam database, like my “Surviving World Steam” CD-ROMs. I have an online table of steam lizards worldwide that you can search, sort, and then create a printable listing, just like one of my CD-ROMs. The Photo Section has a collection of photographs, organized by region, just like my CD-ROMs. If you have Internet Explorer, you can also use the Slide Show feature to page through them, one-by-one, just like paging through one my databases. Plus, you have an online message board for sharing news and observations, a Files Section for sharing documents and notes, and a Links section for sharing bookmarks.

It all works rather well, and I can offer it for free. And if something happens to me, the group will continue to be available on Yahoo; although I donÂ’t know who else would take up the torch of maintaining the database tables.

What I really find lacking is not being able to sort the pictures by say builder and year, rather than location. This is really useful for comparing photographs to identify unknown lizards; and I have actually built myself a “Steam Lizards” program so I could do just that. But it otherwise, it works fine. Access is free, as long as you don’t mind all the banner ads and pop-ups, and possible spam from Yahoo “affiliates”.

I have 65 members right now; which is second only to my “Surviving World Steam Locomotive” CD-ROM in total numbers of “users”, and compares well with the other specialized steam groups I belong to. However, these numbers pale with the 274 members of the Tugboats group, the 553 members of the “steam_tech” group, the 674 members of the “LinersList” group, or the 864 members of the “4L” (The Loyal Legion of Logged-on Loggers) group.

I do believe that databases of potential and current museum artifacts of all kinds are worth having. Not only have the subjects of “where did car xxx go” come up, but recently questions about architectural artifacts came up as well. But, it sounds like it will have to be a strictly voluntary effort, hosted for free somewhere, and for a very limited audience.

Roger Kirkpatrick maintains a captive caboose list, Andrew Toppan maintains a snowplow list, and some websites devoted to a particular RR line list surviving rolling stock from that line. But I am not sure if we will ever see it all come together and maintained in a single database, unless someone has so much interest in the subject they are willing to do so regardless of the lack of return on the effort. For every one buyer of my CD-ROMs, I have a hundred visitors to my “Surviving World Steam” website, but how do you justify spending so much time away from your family in front of a computer screen when they get nothing in return? Would your time be better spent chipping paint and cleaning restrooms at a local museum?

-James Hefner
Hebrews 10:20a

> Boyd: I agee that this is needed. Someone
> needs to start a list of, say, steam era box
> cars. A good place to start would be
> railroad museums. For instance, our museum
> has six box cars, most of which are used for
> storage. But whoever does it should list
> current condition including current paint
> scheme (or lack thereof)and whether the cars
> can be photographed or not.

> Les Beckman (Hoosier Valley Railroad
> Museum/North Judson, Indiana)


Surviving World Steam Project
james1@pernet.net

There is a maritime annalagy for what we are talking about here.

The Museum Small Craft Association keeps a Union List ( everything) that is being preserved of small craft (40 feet or less) allaround the country.

They are allowed to use the computer facilities at Hystic Seaport the countries leading maritime museum and the one with the largest collect in of small craft.

So can a big railroad museum, perhaps Illinois Railway Museum, allow some computer space to house a union list? They have not one but two library buildings.

Them all (!) we have to go is send in the data at our home museums. I will be happy to provide my data on the railroad cars at the Western Railroad Museum. I bet Minneapolis & St Louis cars are not too common. We have one built in 1920!

ted_miles@nps.gov

Had an Access database with about 1200 passenger cars in it but haven't maintained it for the last five years. Major source of information was Trains and I included month and year of issue. Secondarily, some museum websites had a good roster to help. Lastly, a couple of Pullman books helped with lot numbers for Pullman cars.

rusticmike@yahoo.com