Now is your chance to arrange financing! (yes, I know the full listing is hidden)

https://www.ozarkmountainrailcar.com/news/2020/05/02/business-car-adolphus-amtrak-10000/

Paul, only a peripheral part of that car's history occupied the 1970s. The fact that it's available ... in fact, that it has survived this long at all ... deserves its own thread.

I understand that. It was part of Amtrak for most of the first 20 years. Having been an OBS employee in DC, I was around the attendants for the car, and often saw it in Union Station towards the end of their use of it. I remember why they discontinued using it. I think I've mentioned it here before. The Boston Herald did an "expose" on Amtrak's "wasteful" spending around 1991 or '92, with the focus of one article on the elitist executive excess of Amtrak officials use of car 10000. This was during the latter part of the Claytor era, and Mr. Claytor was an old-school CEO who traveled like one. They got hold of either a menu or memo on service for a trip, showing the food and drink the company officials were served, compared to the Amcafe menu for the peons in coach. Soon after that Amtrak ended their arrangement with Kratville (which was pretty sweet; for giving them use of the car he got two weeks every year to go anywhere he wanted with his family on the rear of Amtrak trains, with Amtrak maintaining the car) and sent it back to him. I had a memorable ride sitting with him in the dome on #29 one evening going over Sandpatch talking about that and other things. I met him on a couple of different occasions, I think one of which was a program he did for Potomac Chapter, NRHS, and he was always very decent and approachable.

I strongly disagree about people being apathetic to history.

I think, though, that people are becoming more aware of the fact that the past wasn't "the good old days" and that history is far from being comprised of sunshine and rainbows. I think that makes a lot of existing historians uncomfortable, but it's an important part of really coming to grips with the reality of our past.

As someone who celebrates Conrail's history, I'm always tempted to paper over a lot of it's less pleasant aspects: huge layoffs, abandonments, etc... But in order to really understand something and what bearing its history has on the present you HAVE to take the bad with the good.

It is fortunate that some groups are interested in more "recent" history as there are more people left around to provide first-person confirmation of events and more interest among younger participants in the hobby. Some of our older historical groups have limited their viability and in effect made themselves self-terminating by imposing cutoff dates based on railroad bankruptcies and mergers that are now so far in the past that it discourages participation by younger people.

One group where I have been a member for decades has maintained a cutoff date for their historical focus that passed while I was in college. They have not encouraged coverage of the railroad and its equipment in subsequent ownership. As a result there were relatively few of their published projects over the years where I could provide relevant assistance to them compared with other organizations that have a later cutoff date or more flexible and ongoing approach to their study of history.

PC

There is another, perhaps even more important, aspect of the 'edge of history' which goes largely unremarked at present.

There is an old adage that 'a person is not really dead until the last person who remembers them dies'. The same can be true of knowledge or wisdom -- the question then becoming 'what happens when the last people who remember die'.

Much of the lore of a great many railroad fields was captured in the form of presentations given by knowledgeable people, intended to pass the information along to the interested (and with at least the tacit premise that those taking an interest would, as in the German university system, learn it fully as known and then build upon that structure...) The problem is that those who hear the presentations eventually pass the 'edge of history' themselves, to the point where "history is what you can remember" begins to defeat itself. By the time they have to go reinventing the wheel of the presentations ... well, an awful lot of the time, it doesn't get done. And the knowledge is lost as effectively as it would have been a generation or so earlier.

To me, that means the same attention to documenting and where possible 'future-proofing' actual presentations, in multiple media where possible to avoid functional obsolescence, An organization that tried to do this in some aspects of steam technology was the Newcomen Society in England (regrettably, the American counterpart became a social club for wealthy executives, and then died on the vine when financial management replaced operational...) I don't think there is any one organization in the 'history of science and philosophy' field that has set about doing this for railroad technology yet -- and it is well past time that something was either established or inspired to do so.

As a further example: in my opinion there is a particular unrecognized national treasure, probably worth more than all the code at Bay St. Louis, that deserves both careful preservation and dedicated directed improvement on copies. That is Mr. Cook's 'trained' copy of the Dragon speech-recognition software. The number of person-hours of confusion and delay that one article would solve in many research situations is possibly dramatic. And it would take many, many hours to re-create, assuming we have people of Mr. Cook's character and knowledge to do the training. For all I know, there are many other copies of similar software, carefully trained for particular fields, that are ignorantly lost with "obsolescent" PCs sent by relatives to the dump or recycling. Often the first thing destroyed or wiped is the hard drive...

To me -- world history is full of examples where historical figures or technologies, or even history itself as a field or science, become devalued. Before the 1840s Bach was looked upon as an irrelevant antique, devoid of much interest to musicians, let alone their audiences. Shakespeare had his Bowdlers to make 'the Bard' safe for ankle-averse Victorians... the highest flower of civilization. The whole existence of the early Renaissance hinged, essentially, on a faith that the science and technology of the Romans had not entirely disappeared from the earth -- a faith that turned out not to be right in some cases, and unfortunately unfulfilled in others (Roman large shipbuilding technology, for example, or the chemurgy behind Greek fire) but that did spawn some interesting recovery and association of historical documents and artifacts presumed lost, and re-creation of the technology with 'period' materials and tools to recover what actually was lost.

So it is important to keep, and preserve, whatever source material and scholarship can be found -- whether or not it is "interesting" or brings eyeballs to museums (or, really, whether some of it fits into someone's neat sense of 'mission' or 'scope of accession' at the time).

Right about now we are discovering how important some of the '80s electronic documentation for now-obsolescent locomotive controls would have been. I suspect there were a number of occasions where that could have been found easily and inexpensively, and the people responsible for it found and asked about any undocumented details. In the absence of 20/20 foresight, something dramatically lacking in many cohorts in preservation just as it is in larger societies -- someone has to 'save it all and let God sort it out later'.

It may be a long time before 'political correctness' subsides, or interest in presently-arcane aspects of railroad preservation becomes recognized. It is part of the mission of preservation not to lose heart in ensuring the integrity of the material and knowledge survive, documented and improved, until such time comes.

Another prescient warning:

Haynes (who bought out Chilton some time ago) will stop printing their now-iconic car repair manuals, going all-digital.

https://motorillustrated.com/iconic-hay ... des/65761/

https://jalopnik.com/new-haynes-manuals ... 1845799832

This seems like a great time to let people know about the Conrail Historical Society's oral history program:

https://www.thecrhs.org/oralhistory

If you, or someone you know would be a good interviewee, please have them sign up!

Now, after eighty years of the organized railroad history hobby, the Covid emergency has pushed the successful groups into holding meetings by electronic conferencing, and that is providing a convenient means to preserve presentations. It remains to be seen whether this causes problems with theft of content or violations of copyright law when dozens of people have the opportunity to openly record presentations where they did not contribute effort or images. If there are train hobby shows again in the future we can see if people show up selling DVDs of programs they stole from others. But going into the Covid crisis a few of the local groups didn't even have a viable website and were still stuffing envelopes once a month to notify the members of events and programs.

Several decades ago the NMRA kept a list of programs and presenters to keep track of who was willing to do programs, on what subjects, and how far they were willing to travel. I am only aware of a couple railroad history groups that did this. It is unfortunate that it was not a more widespread practice, particularly among groups that have local chapters, they could have shared a database that supported the effort to find programs to support their events. That kind of organizing would be helpful to the recovery of the groups and the hobby when or if the crisis ends.

I have found over the years that the best way to preserve the content of many presentations has been to publish them as a single or a series of magazine articles, or as a book, if the presentation has enough content and generated enough interest to justify the extra work required to put it into print. That being said, be aware that just an hour of a good, high information value PowerPoint presentation and its narration can require up to 75 pages of printed space in a publication to preserve it in its entirety.

Relatively few of the 35mm format presentations from the 1970s and 1980s have made the "jump" to PowerPoint and been carried along through its file format upgrades. This has been done with a few teaching presentations to support heritage locomotive mechanical and electrical training, but I don't know of many railroad enthusiast information or entertainment programs from four decades ago that are still being shown in PowerPoint or other electronic formats. Many of the programs originally done in slides, if they survive, are still being shown in slides. The experience (discussed in another topic string) with trying to recover one of Jim Boyd's best programs four decades later, after its content had been redistributed into other projects and then gone through estate handling, showed me just how challenging it can be to bring back an old program in a new format.

PC

Many years ago, I came across a curious example of the 'rights' question.

One of the great unsung masterpieces of American political writing is -- as you might suspect, thinking about it a moment -- the document that covers the morality of America undertaking research into the 'superbomb' -- at the depth of losing the early 'cold war', and amid the terror raised by kiloton bombs speeding the end of the world, consciously deciding to engage in research to make weapons a thousand times more powerful. A copy of this survives at the Truman Library in Independence, MO, and I was impressed enough by it to want to see it distributed to historical scholars, at least in the Columbia community, as it should be far better known.

Library policy, however, was 'no photography' and no scanning, although you were perfectly free to make a pencil copy in longhand and take it with you. To this day I have not seen the document reproduced anywhere, and I conclude that it remains hidden treasure ... as are so many presentations where safeguards against copying and 'sale' are made.

One of the fundamental points behind the Google Books initiative was to make potentially worthwhile references freely available. Before that got started, there were several notable attempts in the 'steam community' to find and reprint the more significant 'unobtanium' texts. We now find several of these blocked by dog-in-the-manger copyright enforcement, where the existence of reprints blocks access to the originals, but the reprints themselves have passed into the claws of the rare-book dealers who demand a pound of flesh, or worse, for their "specialty publications".

I would argue that there is little difference between the amount of care and work put into a good presentation and that required for a good book. Strangely, though, there appears to be little difficulty with the idea that books can be freely loaned between individuals without purchase, or resold if owned (even if acquired free or at remaindered prices), or made freely available to consult in libraries -- none of these appear to be options for current presentations, whether PowerPoint enabled or slide.

David Wardale carefully described why he kept the 'list price' of his book on the Red Devil high -- and why he asked purchasers of the book not to loan it out, or sell to anyone except at the price they paid for it. He thought people would care for something that cost them to procure, whether or not they agreed with its importance or its lessons, and I am far from telling him he's not right. On the other hand there has been considerable artificial scarcity between reprints of this book -- and a certain feast-or-famine problem when it is.

Given the vastly greater cost of production of print books, even assuming one is put together with no errata and with good photos and typography, we can expect the same 'aftermarket' profiteering, quite possibly following a limited return to the author on initial publication. I am not sure this is still the definitive answer it once was.

Now, I have considerable experience with preparing and delivering slide presentations, including that early version of PowerPoint, using progressive text slides with glass mounts so text could be colorized with markers or dye. That includes versions of a number of presentations on retinoblastoma (an eye disorder) which when delivered as a personal presentation could often run long or be incompletely finished within a fixed presentation time -- this is solved by recording voice tracks of appropriate length, with appropriate audio-track embedded signal commands to drive the slide projector, and the presentation arranged that multiple 'peeps' could skip slides for the shorter presentations (or jump over the 'interest getting' slides for more serious audiences...). There were programs decades ago that could do the equivalent with .jpg images or scans of slides in video and coordinate them with a recorded narration, which can then be rendered in multiple languages that are easily selected at run time, or 'subtitled' relatively easily. Nothing more than this is necessary to preserve a slide-based program whether or not there are multiple 'other' versions of the same program produced by other narrators, or different programs with similar material.

The best 'cure' for people selling DVDs is to make a scarce program freely available. We used to use the term 'egoboo' to discuss why programmers in a bazaar-style effort would work 'free' with a wild will to build a less imperfect world, and this is not terribly different from Maxim Gorky's ribbons. While I am not expert enough on the DMCA to know what could be done to suppress "illegal" copy for sale of a free-to-air presentation, there is ample precendent in literature for the use of copyright to protect such resources (the practice used for the RSV Bible being one such).

And, of course, DVD burning is remarkably easy, and remarkably cheap, for the production numbers corresponding to actual presentation demand in the enthusiast community, and commercial small-scale DVD production an established industry for areas like indie bands. Somewhere between the two, squeezing out the opportunists, or making them provide a fair royalty to the original author without consternation, ought to be practical. Even more possible is to get rid of the ancient problem with 'bootlegs' shot with shaky low-light video cameras on the sly.

I could not agree more with the idea of producing a coherent database on presentation availability, particularly if it is backed up with presentations that can be served -- even if by 'streaming' with copying safeguards -- over the Internet or equivalent.

It's a little bit OT, but maybe not.

Talking about the electronics issues - particularly when you can't fix something with a wrench and weld rod, and you can see the trends toward all-digital records. And now, images.

1) If you have a substantial electronic library for your or your organization, make sure that you've got a known hard copy somewhere of how to get into it, maybe with your will, regularly updated, of where stuff is and what the passwords are or at least where the website is. The easiest way for everything to disappear is just to not be able to get into it to preserve it. Applies to banking and financial records access as well. With two-factor recognition, you better make sure somebody can get in your cell phone as well if something happens. Another deadly sin to to realize that website registration has a contact e-mail, and if it expires and nobody knows, or the owner is deceased, all that 'stuff' you scanned and helped preserve digitally is poof-gone - maybe archived, but maybe not.

2) There's a lot of old media out there - I just ran into an individual that had a 'lifetime collection' of photos - on Iomega cartridges. Obsolete for years, and the devices are not supported under Windows 10. So here's a tip, for all the guys that save everything from old spikes to 2-10-4's - keep ONE operational computer system of each major OS type mothballed someplace. I've got a collection myself going back to a running 286 equipped with Windows 3.0, and each major system after that. Those old systems are worthless for parts or scrap value, but priceless if you have to recover old information off of old media at some point. And keep them in a dust-free area, please.

3) One of the key volunteer skills in the future will be handling the electronics issues, from old media, to backups, to simply knowing which end of a soldering iron not to pick up or that resistance is not a political statement. Don't look down on the millennials and younger that know this stuff, you may be in a situation with future equipment where some digital whatzit brings a locomotive to its knees just as effectively as a cracked cylinder on your steamer would. I've started to see it myself, and with the electronics boards and controls in Dash-2's and later, it's just starting. Imagine 20 years from now.

Railroading has always been a niche where equipment life has been measured in decades, rebuilds flourish, and competent mechanical skills are worshiped. In the 70's and later, add digital and electronics to that mix, and also recognize that there's a flourishing field of collectors of old technology that could be very handy here. My own son has restored a late-70s version of PacMan arcade cabinet to full function and stunned me by the number of guys collecting this antique electronic stuff.

Adding to what Randy has contributed, I have found that my Windows 98SE computer with an early version of Office 2007 and an Iomega drive has become a valuable link to bring files from the 1990s into the 2020s. It recently saved and updated an enormous collection of teaching notes and procedures written by a person who was a very capable instructor in the railroad industry. It is a relatively modern machine that was backdated to W98SE for use with older computer games.

PC

Not too railroad-related, but I had the last known "IBM" card reader at UC Berkeley. Got to meet some interesting people in other disciplines who found decks of cards full of important data which had to be saved (by copying to floppy disks).

The card reader was retired shortly after I retired.

A professor at Iowa State has an interesting web page on the history of punched cards.

The lack of "sharing" PowerPoint lectures is in part because people who have spent days or even weeks of effort to put together a PowerPoint program or clinic for an event, and had to load it onto a group's computer for showing, have walked into a train show sometime later and found somebody they don't know who is selling copies of their program, often with all credits and captions removed. There could be more sharing if more people in the hobby were trustworthy. It is a sad situation, but not too different from the folks who harvest content and images from the internet and package and resell them. The result for preservation organizations is that fewer people volunteer to develop programs for events or content for websites.

PC