Whatever happened to the original steam- and diesel-era mechanical drawings produced by the American Locomotive Company, headquartered in Schenectady, NY? I am aware of some Cooke, Manchester and Rhode Island drawings (as well as a good portion of the ALCO builder's negatives) are in the possession of the Mohawk & Hudson Chapter NRHS, but what happened to the balance of the company material? My fear is that the classic story of "it all got sent to the landfill" will once again ring true...any information would be appreciated by this inquisitive railroad archivist. Thank you!<br><br>



Kurtrbell@hotmail.com

They have a lot of the drawings on photos at Mohawk & Hudson Chapter NRHS. They also have some spec sheets.<br>



lvrr@enter.net

A full set of drawings for one steam locomotive, or one order of steam locomotives, is about 1,800-2,500 individual drawings (depending on the size and complexity of the locomotive(s) in question), with the individual drawings ranging in size from 8 1/2" x 11" all the way up to about 3' x 18'.<p>When one takes into account how many orders ALCo produced, it becomes obvious that there would have been hundreds of thousands, if not several million, individual drawings involved. Enough to fill a warehouse. Even accounting for dupications and drawings of appliances that wouldn't change much from order to order, it's still a huge volume of paper and/or linen. If it all existed in one spot today, I'm sure we'd know about it, just on the basis of it's size. I doubt that MLW (for example) would want to bear the cost of storing and protecting that much useless (to them) paper, so I suspect the vast majority of these things went to a dump or incinerator many years ago.<p>Of course, if converted to microfilm, the storage problem would be far less, but even then, it would consume a lot of space, not to mention the need to sort and catalog.<p>I suspect that some drawings do survive, scattered around the country, but it's very unlikely that all of them survive.<br>

Let me add that I would relish being proven wrong about this and that the drawings actually DO exist somewhere.<br>

But nowhere near what didn't. Young Bo Glover (now in his 70s) worked in his youth in the drafting room after the demise of locomotive production and was paid but little. He couldn't afford handkerchiefs so he simply dissolved the ink and binder from the old linen drawings and used them for the purpose. Wonder if Sam Vauclain and the Van Swearingens did the same?<p>Dave<br>



lathro19@idt.net