Railroad Museum of Pennyslvania Archives and Library

A new interface for the collection of the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg, PA is now available:

http://rrmuseumpa.org/about/library/search.shtml

It's well worth checking out.

Yahoo! Groups and List Servs

It may be cliche, but the internet really does have the ability to bring together people who would not normally be able to meet. In many cases this leads to some good opportunities for research.

Back in ye olden days of the internet, that was usenet. Nowadays there are groups and list-servs around for pretty much any topic. One resource that has been particularly useful to the railroad historian and prototype modeler has been Yahoo! Groups.

Yahoo Groups related to railroad history and prototype modeling tend to be fairly heavily moderated. This is a good thing for the serious researcher as it keeps the trolls from taking over and flame wars from starting.

While there are many good people on these groups, one must always remember the need to critically evaluate a source. If someone is just spouting off an opinion or even an educated guess, that won't necessarily be a fact. If someone can provide some back-up either in the form of a citation or collection they used to learn this information, then you as a researcher have something you can work with.

Bearing this need for critical analysis in mind, there are many things people can learn on the various Yahoo Groups related to railroad history. Of particular use is the ability to learn things from retired railroaders or meet people who are on the other side of the country but may have a significant document collection that is of use to your research.

It also is a good way to get into or develop a network of like-minded railroad researchers. I got into the B&O Railroad Historical Society Archivist position because of being on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Yahoo Group. This in turn has allowed me to develop my own network of railroad researchers, archivists and historians. Together we bounce ideas off one another, call for research assistance and just generally share things we happen to learn that may be of use to others.

So, with my earlier words of caution in mind, have fun and happy researching!

Hagley Visit Part II

After lunch Dick and I visited the Soda House at the Hagley. This building houses the museum's collection of manuscripts and archives.  There is a lot of historical information here for those interested in railroads, particularly for those interested in either the Pennsylvania Railroad or the Reading Railroad.  While most modelers focus on pictorial collections, there is a lot of additional information that can be found amongst the manuscripts and archives.  We'll take a look at a few examples to give you an idea of the breadth of information that is available.  

If you visit the Soda House you can look at the finding aids for either railroad contained in a number of binders.  Even before you visit you can do some upfront work by simply going to the Hagley library's online catalog and doing some searches.  As I mentioned in my previous blog the most successful search is done by first casting a wide net and then narrowing the search down. 

To start, one can open up the online catalog and click on Manuscripts and Archives in the Quick Limit search just like we had clicked on Photographs, Prints and Moving Images when we were searching the pictorial collection. Then type in Pennsylvania Railroad for your keyword search and click on search. As you might expect the hits are numerous, roughly 10,000.  Fortunately they are ordered according to relevance so to look at major collections you probably will need to scroll through the first hundred or less.  You will notice there are a lot of corporate records which represents the business aspects of the railroad.  If you are curious about what is contained in any of these either click on the display number or the title. 

This will take you to a page that will explain more precisely what the files contain. Listed will be the author, in this case the Pennsylvania Railroad, the dates covered by the material, description of the material i.e. in one case there are 28 linear feet of files, how the files are organized and then two very important items, a history of the material and the scope and content of the material.  These last two items are fairly detailed and will be helpful in deciding whether it is likely to have the information you are looking for.

Let's take a look at a few examples.  For those people interested in engines you might try clicking on the records of the motive power department.  This is a huge collection that contains information on types and numbers of rolling stock as well as information concerning the design and construction of various pieces of equipment. If you scroll through you will also see records from the office of the chief engineer for different regions of the Pennsylvania Railroad system. These often describe construction projects on the right of way.  

For example the one from the Eastern Region contains documents describing the completion of 30^th St. Station and the demolition of the old Broad Street Station.  It is really worth perusing the various hits because more than likely you will find some items of interest.  While a lot of the archival material concerns the business aspects of the railroad there is still a lot of material that would be useful to the modeler.  Many times there are track diagrams, particularly when changes were being made to the right of way.  Also there are detailed drawings, sometimes in the form of blueprints for stations and other railroad structures.

While the examples  I have given so far concern the Pennsylvania Railroad there is also a lot of material from the Reading Company.  When Dick and I visited the Soda House we looked through the two binders containing the finding aids. While the pleasure of going to the Hagley is finding something you were looking for, it's also the unexpected is also very rewarding.  For us that day it was looking at the traffic density map for Fairhill Junction in Philadelphia one for day in 1941. The surprise was that a train was moving through on average once every 7 minutes. A busy railroad in wartime.

-Ron

"Quid pro quo (Clarice)"

Quid pro quo, latin for "something for something." One of the most important currencies in the field of research other than cash money.

It's a sad fact of life that no museum, library or archive ever has as much money, staff or institutional knowledge as they would like.  Preserving documents is an expensive business unto itself.  (That's one of the reasons that so many libraries and archives have taken Google up on the offer to digitize their collections.)   There are never enough people to go around and catalog the collection and help field research requests, no matter how large the budget is for staffing.  And even if you had a large number of staff in your facility, the subjects that railroad history covers are so broad that you would need scores of experts to be able to accurately respond to the many inquiries you receive.

Because of these restrictions, or rather facts of life, archivists and librarians who run these facilities are often very reliant on their volunteers.  These volunteers very often get their posts via their own knowledge of railroad history or railroad technology.  The benefit for many of these volunteers is that they get a better level of access to the items in the collection because they commit time to improving the institution and have shown that they are able and willing to respect the collection to a greater degree than the average patron.  For the railroad researcher this usually means being able to spend a lot of quality time with the documents they are most interested in.

Now, the big hurdle for anyone is getting a volunteer posting.  There's always a certain amount of "seasoning" that's doled out by the institution to make sure they are getting a committed volunteer and not just a daisy-picker who is volunteering in order to get enhanced access for their own agenda.  Here are some things you need to keep in mind when you're looking to become a volunteer:

1.) Are you able and willing to commit the time to really be able to contribute to the overall improvement of your institution of choice?  30 minutes a week is probably not going to do much to help out.  A day is better.

2.) Do you really care about this institution? There's a certain amount of passion required from volunteers.  They are supposed to want to come out rain or shine and spend a day working in the institution for FREE.  That's not to say you have to make it every day, but you have to be there and you have to care about doing a good job.  If you can't motivate yourself to do the work, it's probably a good idea to just pass on the position.

3.) Be ready to have to do some menial jobs when you first get in.  The fly by night volunteer is something that has burned volunteer coordinators in the past.  (I'm making a special effort not to use the term "foamer", but I'm talking about people who want to play and not work.)  One way to weed those people out is by giving out menial tasks to the new folks.  The committed stay with it, the uncommitted tend to stop showing up.  Think of it as your 30 day new hire period at your full time job.

4.) Spending some time talking with the archivist or librarian before you volunteer is always a good idea.  First, this is the person who will be directing your work and will be responsible for your actions in the library.  If there's not a good personality mix, it's probably a good idea to look somewhere else.  It's also an excellent way to look for things that need to be done, the cataloging of a particular collection, digitization of photographs, a box of images that are unidentified, etc.  If you can communicate your areas of expertise and come up with a project to utilize them to benefit the institution right away, that will go a long way towards helping you become a volunteer.

5.) Being a member of the institution or the institution's "friends of" group is also helpful.  It shows you're willing to put your money where your mouth is. 

6.) Don't be put off by a no.  Some facilities just can't have volunteers working in the collection, it's not a judgment on you.  If you get a no, accept it and still offer to help in any way you can.  Getting indignant won't help your cause.

7.) If you are able to volunteer and can help at your institution, remember to use it for good.  Don't abuse the privileges you are awarded by nature of your service.  Volunteers have been shut out of institutions as a whole because a handful have abused the collection via their volunteer access.  Don't let that happen.  Remember that these resources cannot be replaced in many cases.  By becoming a volunteer at a library or an archive you are taking on some responsibility for their protection.

Once you get your post, you are not truly in a position to trade your time an knowledge for the privilege of helping out the institution and getting a greater level of access to the collection.  It is truly "something for something."

-Nick

A Visit to the Hagley

One of my favorite places for doing railroad research is the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington DE. (http://www.hagley.org/library/) The museum and library are situated on the grounds of the original Dupont powderworks dating back to the early 1800's and is a beautiful setting anytime of the year. The library is one of the premier centers for the study of industry in the United States and houses collections from amny large corporations, Bethlehem Steel, and Dupont to name a few. Over the last few years the Hagley has really been on the forefront in digitizing various aspects of their collection to make them available to a much wider audience. At some later point I will review those efforts. Today however I thought I would walk people through what is involved in accessing the collections at the Hagley. While much of the searches can be done online, only a very tiny portion of the archives have actually been digitized, thus eventually necessitating a trip to the Hagley Nevertheless, most folks would like some reassurance that before they make the trip there will be something of interest for them.

A friend of mine Dick Foley, a Reading Railroad enthusiast, came to visit me and I suggested that we go to the Hagley and see whether they would have some information that would be useful for his modeling. Since I had not done a lot of research on the Reading Railroad myself I thought this would be a nice test case for starting at the beginning and essentially walking through the search process. Dick has been building a layout depicting the Reading City Line and the Willow St. Branch in Philadelphia, so information on those areas would be of interest to him. Naturally for most modelers visuals, meaning pictures, are probably the most valuable source of information. After signing in at the front desk of the library we proceeded down the hall to Jon Williams, chief archivist of the Hagley pictorial collection. After a brief discussion of Dick's interests, we sat down at the computer and began our search. Obviously we could have done this initial search at home but for illustrative purposes I'll just describe what we did at Jon's office.

First we go the Hagley homepage and click online catalog. Before we type in something to search for, we go down and in the Quick Limits menu box we click on photographs, prints and moving images since we really want to look through the pictorial collection. We wouldn't necessarily need to do that but if one does a general search you are probably going to get many more hits than what you want to scroll through. Once we clicked photographs we were ready to type in our search terms. A word about searches. Often as prototype model railroaders we usually want to find details on very specific items. The problem is that catalogs and finding aids don't necessarily capture every last detail, so that by typing in something very specific you might not find anything. I speak from personal experience. The best is to cast a very broad net first, and then from those hits try and focus the search down. In this case we just entered Reading in our search. With that we got 34 hits that represented a number of different photographic collections.

Now when you are faced with all these different collections which one do you decide to look at? Simply by clicking on the title of the collection you will get a description of what is in the collection. These descriptions are by no means all encompassing but they will give you a general idea of whether you are on the right track or not. For instance we clicked on Reading Company photographs. These tended to be smaller collections and for the purposes of this search were of places outside the Philadelphia area. We finally settled on the Reading Company photograph collection which appeared to have the most photographs and that would also include photographs from the Philadelphia area.

Once we decided on this collection what do next? We now come to the topic Nick spoke about in his first blog, the finding aid. For each collection there is a detailed accounting of what is in every box of the collection. Unfortunately not all finding aids are online, and the one we were interested in is still hardcopy which Jon handed to us to look through. At this point I will interject a comment about what Nick calls the quid pro quo of doing research. Obviously putting finding aids online is time consuming and in general there is not sufficient staff to do this along with all the other work associated with maintaining archives. The Reading Company photographic collection represents nearly 5000 different photographs. Yes, I'm suggesting that this would be one of those jobs for volunteers to help put this finding aid online.

The finding aid then gave a fairly detailed listing of all the items in the collection. Basically by reading the brief description we could zero in on the box of interest. We filled out the requisite card for obtaining the box and within a few minutes Jon returned from the stacks with the appropriate box. Needless to say Dick found some great photographs!

A final note. When you go into places like the Hagley Library you seen realize this is not your local library, you just can't walk around and browse. The collections in these places are far to large and complex to allow people to simply pull items off the shelf. Nevertheless when you order a box like Dick and I did, it usually contains more than the folder you are specifically interested in. In many cases it is closely related material. So for me its always like Christmas morning when the box arrives. Its got the folder you requested, like the present your ordered, but then there are all these other delightful surprises. Just remember in your excitement, only remove ONE folder from the box at one time, and always make sure it is put back in the order your received it. Well by the time we had gone through the folder it was lunch time so we took a break and when we return we'll go down to the Hagley Soda House (no they don't sell beverages there) where there are a different type of railroad archives.

Ron

Where did the records go? A guide for sleuthing railroad documentation

One of the biggest problems confronting individuals who are looking for railroad records is that of the consolidation of the railroad industry in the United States and Canada. As railroads consolidated many records were disposed of or simply lost. Other records were moved to the new owner's archives and disposed of from there, or in some cases, retained for historic or financial reasons.

In addition to consolidation among railroads, railroad equipment manufacturers also experienced a consolidation. Some companies like Pullman and Standard Steel Car have disappeared completely. Others like ALCO have been acquired by other industrial companies like General Electric.

This makes being able to trace corporate lineage a useful skill when researching for the records of defunct railroads and railroad manufacturers. This is particularly useful when seeking out information on railroads that were bought by larger rivals in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

The internet helps a great deal with overcoming this issue. Collaborative library catalogs such as WORLDCAT (http://www.worldcat.org) and other library catalogs that have been placed on-line allow researchers to search by the corporate author of a document or the subject of a document.

It's more useful to know corporate lineage when one is attempting to access documents in a museum archive or to contact a corporation directly. In most cases these records have no useful purpose for the current business of the descendant companies and have been de-accessioned. For example, the records of the Norfolk and Western Railway have been de-accessioned by Norfolk Southern Corp to the Norfolk and Western Historical Society (http://www.nwhs.org/.) This includes the records for many smaller railroads that was taken over by Norfolk and Western before it merged with the Southern Railway.

In addition to railroad companies, railroad related institutions have changed their focus over time. The American Association of Railroads once maintained an extensive research library in Washington, DC known as the Bureau of Railway Economics. The AAR changed to a focus on lobbying and less on internally produced research and donated the collection to the Barriger Library in St. Louis, MO (http://www.umsl.edu/barriger/collections/bre.htm)

In addition to the internet, you may find this book useful. It's out of print, but should be available via inter-library loan:

Railroad Names: a directory of common carrier railroads operating in the United States, 1826-1997 by William D. Edson.

It has some obscure railroads that may be flying below the radar of some web sites. It's especially useful when looking at images of or ledgers of rolling stock with unfamiliar reporting marks.

So keep the idea of corporate lineage in mind when constructing your search. It sure makes life easier!

Learn to Love the Humble Finding Aid

An archive is a storehouse of knowledge. The usefulness of any archive is measured in the ability of one to be able to access that knowledge quickly and accurately. This is accomplished via a tool called a "Finding Aid."

The finding aid allows you, the patron, to locate any item or series of items you would like from a specific collection. It also translates topics, subjects, names and dates into the language of archivists, namely the file, box and shelf location of the materials.

A finding aid will also provide the context of the collection. Usually this will consist of a brief biographical or historical note about the source of the collection and the provenance of the acquisition. The finding aid will also announce any restrictions on access or duplication that may be placed on items in the collection you are using.

Most archives are moving their finding aids to their home pages. This is a great benefit for the researcher as it allows them to plan their trip to the facility in advance and in many cases request materials before their arrival. This allows researchers to spend less time waiting for items to be pulled from the stacks and more time actually using the materials to perform meaningful research.

Let's take a look at an example to help show how Finding Aids make the researcher's life easier:

We'll take a look at the B&O Railroad Museum's Hays T. Watkins Library and Archives Finding Aid for the CSX Collection.



You'll see that the first part of this document describes the collection, provides notice that access may be restricted and gives instructions for accessing the collection. It also states that the finding aid itself is a searchable PDF file and gives instructions for how to locate items in the document.



The next image here shows how the collection is physically arranged. You can see that there are box numbers and individual locations for the items in that series. If you wanted say, the Annual Reports of the Buffalo Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway from 1882-1900, you would need to ask for Box 402-H-1, Location 16.2.8. This gives the archivist the physical location of these items and allows them to quickly locate them on the shelf and retrieve them for you.

Without the finding aid, this would be a much more difficult task. The archivist would be required to know the exact location of all items in this collection. If you were to look at the finding aid, you'd see it is a very large collection and such a feat would be impractical.

So next time you're planning to do some research at an archive, help make it as productive as possible by using the finding aid.

Greetings!

We're Nick Fry and Ron Hoess. We both work with railroad archives, Ron has volunteered at the Hagley Library and Museum in Wilmington DE and Nick with the B&O Railroad Historical Society. Nick by profession is an archivist with a degree in library science and has considerable experience in archive organization.

We had been working independently when in March 2010 we both had the chance to give presentations at the Railroad Prototype Modelers Meeting in Malvern, PA. Both our talks reflected a similar theme of retrieving archival material to help guide prototype modeling efforts. After the event we decided that a blog would be a good way to pool our knowledge and provide a platform to help model railroaders and anyone interested in railroads to learn more about how to access the wealth of archival material that is out there.

We hope that visitors to this site find the information useful and they will have a good time learning more about their favorite railroad subjects.