With caution:

My favourite bumper sticker is the one that proclaims,

"They Got the Library in Alexandria; THEY WON'T GET MINE!!!!!!"

That being said, we have any number of instances where what were thought to be secure archives have vanished. One primary culprit was the wholesale transfer of crumbling old newspaper archives to microfilm--much of which itself is now fading and crumbling--and the subsequent discarding of the originals.

The information in a book, or even such things as doctoral theses or magazine articles, is ONLY useful if: 1) an interested party can figure out such information ever existed in the first place, and 2) has some means of accessing such printed matter.

I've been shocked at the number of times I've gone to what should have been an obvious repository for a specific book, and found that either a) they didn't even know such a book existed, as they were never tipped off by the author or publisher or interested members/patrons, or b) they HAD the tome, but it was stolen, "lost" or even discarded account condition issues by someone who had no idea of the scarcity or local importance. I have personally placed many now-rare volumes in public or museum archives, in some cases to replace lost copies, with the provision that they be held in non-circulating reserve in permanent "local history" collections. As the relative price of a lot of railroad history books continues to decline in many markets, such placement or replacement should be a priority for just about any rail history group that find itself with "spare" copies of significant books.

The status for 7312 is the same as it's been for about the last 3 years or so. No work has progressed recently. Being as busy as we are with contract work, and with keeping up our operating steam, time hasn't permitted much work to progress.

There is a tentatively laid plan...for now. Nothing major to talk about. I will say that the addition of some good workers to compliment our existing staff would be great!

Thanks for the update and kind reply regarding the #31 - for a while it seemed like anyone asking about the #31 was taken out back and flogged (maybe a slight exaggeration) ;) - while I certainly understand why it's not a priority - the #31 is a really neat locomotive with lots of history to both the Strasburg Railroad and railway preservation in general.

I'll be excited to see it run again. I THINK I rode behind it many years ago... but that was before I was keeping track of locomotives.


I also hope that Strasburg will host railfan events again... it's nice to have an excuse to be up there for a few days!

This may not be an exaggeration! :)

It's not to say 31/7312 isn't a priority, steam engines can be fickle, and as many before be that sat in this very office they are DIVAS.

Balancing contract work for customers and working on our own equipment can be an interesting set of tasks to juggle and we do the best we can not to short change our passenger service or our mechanical customers. Both are the reason we are here still today.

Keep your eyes on the calendar for next June as far as events. Any events will be announced on the website, social media, etc. but we expect to have regular birthday celebrations here at the railroad starting next year. As far as a reason to visit, everyday we do something special here!

About a year ago, I right clicked, copied & saved all of the back "Updates" postings including the photographs. If there's something you want to preserve on rypn.org, go back and do what I did, save it to a Word document and print it out. Viola! My best advice is *don't wait.*

I do the same thing for anything of value on social media. You just gotta "do it now" (e.g., be proactive!) if you want to see it again in the future. Nothing on the web is ever permanent - but you can make it permanent. And this is coming from an Archivist. :-)

K.R. Bell

Thank you Mr. Barger for the reply to my inquiry. I was thinking of 7312 especially now with 90 down for its 1472 and 89 and 475 currently being the only steam locomotives available. Just thinking it would be good to have another for backup in case one goes down unexpectedly.

John

Kurt, Maybe you and I can get together one day so we can get copies of Kelly's old posts? I'd like to have access to that here, I'm sure others in the company would as well.




There is some solid thinking in your statements and I can say you are not the only one who follows that line of thinking!