Many of you may be aware of the John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library and its flickr page for photographs from Mr. Barriger, his son Stanley, AC&F, and Robert and G Hansell Lewis. (http://www.flickr.com/barrigerlibrary)

We have had a great deal of success with crowdsourcing information about our images and this success has led to another project.

The Milwaukee Road Historical Association has contacted us and would like to work on a joint photo identification program using the aerial photos of the Milwaukee Road's Real Estate Department. We (thanks to Ron Goldfeder) have already started scanning the Barriger's set of these photos and have begun posting them online on a stand alone Flickr page:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/milwaukeeroadproject

Some images are obvious, some have identifications on the photos, but others are a complete mystery. We'd appreciate your help and the help of anyone you think can assist us. Just leave a comment on the photo in question and we'll hopefully all have an accurate description of what we're looking at.

Thanks again.

-Nick Fry
Curator
John W. Barriger III
National Railroad Library
http://www.umsl.edu/barriger

Nick,

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for posting the Barringer photos to Flickr where they can freely be accessed by all. Many archives hold their photos for high ransom, basically denying the public the ability to learn from them. You are breath of fresh air for someone who is used to being charged $15 per scan for a photo from their collection.

I have learned much about the railroads and industry in the Pittsburgh to Cleveland region thanks to the Barringer collection. Keep up the good work!

The Barringer Library at the St. Louis Mercantile Library is a real treasure. The Mercantile Library itself dates to the 1840s, and has a very valuable and unique collection, not limited to just books. It is a valuable research archive that is thankfully open to the public and thanks to the work of Mr. Fry, his staff, and volunteers, is making more and more of the collection available to the public.

As the guy doing the scanning of these photos I'd like to add a few thoughts about what others can do to help with the project. As Nick said, some of the photos are marked on the back with where it was taken, what we are looking at, and what direction we are looking towards. But most are only marked with a photo number and a date, some only with the number and nothing else. Town names, states, and directional info are sorely needed. Some sites were photographed several times during the late 60s and early to mid 70s, when most are dated, as a new industry was located on the railroad, and we would really, really like to know about these. In some cases we can see industry or town names on water towers or roof tops, sometimes on billboards or store fronts to identify them, but some may not be correct or we may have used the wrong state. We check against the Official Guide for these and also use Google, but can still be wrong, so corrections or additional info would be welcome. We now have over 600 available to view and should have the rest of the box done in a few days. But we understand another box of older ones has been located and is on the way to us so please check back from time to time.

The scanning of the first box is complete and the second has arrived. There were over 700 images in this box, with some being single copies and others up to eight or ten of the same thing. I now see that the photos are dated from 1957 through the mid-80s, longer than I thought earlier. We have photos starting from number two in the set/collection in 1957 and hopefully there will be few numerical gaps when all are scanned. Thanks to those who have already corrected a few mistakes we made and have identified towns from unmarked photos, along with the direction of the view. These are like a time machine for all interested in the Milwaukee Road and to some extent other lines that intersected with them at various points.

I contributed after noticing the power plant I saw so many times while on family vacations in Ortonville, MN.

There are now over 850 photos posted. Location identifications and data would be greatly appreciated. Please take a look. And we do know that Galewood yard was not spelled right in a few of them. There are probably a few other typos.

A correction. Make that 828 photos.

PSA here for the "edit post" feature, which is made for that afterthought edit. If you don't see an "edit" button, go to User Control Panel / Board Preferences / My Board Style: And pick a different style such as "subsilver2“. Some styles do not show the edit button.

You say the photos have nothing on them but a number and they're sequential and unique. No one goes to that kind of trouble without a reason. Somewhere there must be an index file containing the information you expect. It may be on a computer.

Unfortunately many next-of-kin treat computers the same as furniture, as if there is no treasure trove of knowledge on the hard drive. Sometimes it's more complicated because they may know (or fear) there are other things on the hard drive. You need a tech with the utmost of discretion who is able to "un-see" documents which are none of your beeswax, and keep the secrets of the dead.

Disregard that Barriger, who died in 1976, predated personal computers.

I'm currently dealing with a slide collection where each individual slide the guy took was stamped with its own serial number in sequential order--an estimated 110,000 slides, of which we have everything from your typical railfan blather to extensive documentation of the construction of, or last days of, steam railway, subway and light rail systems all over the world to exploration of incredibly remote locations in far-off Thailand, Belgium, Kuala Lumpur, etc.
48295: a selfie of him in the hotel room mirror.
48564: a rickshaw going by on a street, a plinthed steam loco in the background corner.
48565: said steam loco, a 4-6-2 #ed 244, chicken wire over the cab windows and bacxk, painted green and black. As a matter of fact, this one: http://www.steamlocomotive.info/vlocomo ... play=17295

He had time to stamp them. He didn't have time to write captions or a catalog. Trust me.

By archivist standards, we're lucky Barriger even numbered them and occasionally wrote a location. We're luckier still that we have this "crowdsourcing" available in modern communications networks to enable us to make this collection eminently more useful now.

The entire collection is now on-line and the total is 1432 images. As for the question about records that would decode the numbering system, we would love it if this would surface somewhere, but we don't have it. We suspect they kept a log book with numbers and locations. Remember that the collection started in 1957. Finding such a log book would be easier to deal with than a reel of computer tape, set of punch cards, etc.