The staff and volunteers at Barriger Library have been very busy scanning many thousands of slides I donated and the results of their dedicated efforts are posted here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/barrigerlibrary/albums/

Some of the items being posted are from my years as a college student, when I was learning how to do industrial photography. Access to the railroad was provided by the father of a classmate. That highly respected gentleman was a major influence on my subsequent decisions to spend 50 years teaching in the railroad and marine industries.

There are many items yet to post, including thousands of previously unpublished night photos, and walk-around photo surveys of new equipment shot 40 or more years ago. Some of these programs were stored for many decades, the railroads they cover were absorbed in mergers long ago. About 99% of the railroad industry photography has never been shown or published since when it was originally shot.

I will be eventually providing location information as they scan the images. In a few cases I may write captions when it is appropriate. Most of my available time now has to go to getting a few remaining large articles completed. I am sorry it is taking so long to respond to inquiries from RYPN participants, but there is so much that needs to be done.

PC

Future title: The Lost Years: The Early Photography of Preston Cook.

If the preview is just a sample, it should be a best-seller.

Generous donation, Preston.

Thanks for the comments. The railroad tug photos were posted on the Barriger site last week and a couple questions came in, so I will share the answers here:

In the shot of the Chessie tug J. SPEED GRAY on the Barriger site, shown leaving the tug basin with the ship in the background, the person on the pier is Jim Boyd. Captain Weaver landed him there to photograph the departing tugs from the pier while I did photos from another tug. In historically appropriate General MacArthur fashion, Jim yelled “I have returned” as he landed, since he boarded the tug from the same pier earlier that day. Unlike the General, he did not ask to stage the return several times for photos. This photo session was done in 1983.

The red sunset shot of the Chessie tug M. I. DUNN developed as the last shots of the tug CHESSIE delivery trip in 1984. We were hours late arriving in Newport News due to thick fog off New Jersey. The DUNN pulled alongside and the only option in the afterglow was 1/8 second wide open. Fortunately my camera had a crosshairs with ruler focusing screen and I was able to follow the tug accurately.

I did the delivery trips of both the CHESSIE and the SEABOARD.

The M. I. DUNN had the greatest name recognition of any railroad tug, with or without a knowledge of railroad history.

There are a few slides posted on the website so far that I do not remember. It could be failing memory or it could be items given to me by friends who did not put their names on the slides. If the latter, we will try to get them correctly credited as we identify them. This is challenging fifty years afterwards.

PC

Been loving the marine stuff and can not wait to see more.

I recently got all of the logs from the NYCH tugs, so if we have dates, we can almost pin down those moves to the minute. One lining a carfloat on the nose up the East River is a long dead artform. Nobody would ever think of doing that today with a 1500HP single screw tug.

That leads to another question I got today - Who was the NYCH tug captain shown in my photos on the Barriger Library website? My recollection is that he is Salvatore Notarile, and that he assisted several railroad historical society annual conventions held in the New York area by doing waterfront history lectures and providing narration on harbor cruises.

PC

I do not think that is Sal. Sal traditionally wore a beret. I will pull out of of the logs tomorrow and see who the Mate (they called him "assistant captain" at NYCH) was in that era.

The M.I. Dunn was the last working railroad tug on the East Coast (Theresa S. Krause) and is currently for sale.

Answering a question received by e-mail: As photos are scanned, I am trying to keep up with a list of locations. I will not be making a list for the Erie-Lackawanna because those photos are from the 1987 book ERIE-LACKAWANNA MEMORIES and are all fully described in the book.

PC

PLEASE see about getting slides and collateral together and have someone from one of the 'living heritage' programs, like the one at the Smithsonian, record you giving the various presentations you've made over the years. A definitive version of each ought to be on record, and the Barriger Library is perhaps the best place to host them...

I did programs and clinics for 50 years from the 1960s to 2018, and a few of the hosting organizations have recordings of those programs. There were multiple showings at many NRHS chapters, a few museums, and at the NMRA national convention. I doubt that the NRHS or R&LHS national organizations have any recordings because they never invited me to speak at their national conventions.

PC

Unfortunately, unless such a program recording is both prepared by and specifically preserved by a good archive or library that keeps updating recordings, such recordings tend to end up being useless in the long run. Typically you'll find it was recorded on someone's home VHS camera/recorder, set up in a corner of the banquet hall, with no microphone except the one on the camera capturing the room's horrendous acoustics, and the projected pictures in question are postage-stamp size on a big TV, which BTW is showing grainy old VHS quality after 25+ years of deterioration. (Sadly, there are still organizations now doing Zoom presentations of events and meetings in exactly that same lackadaisical, sloppy format.)

The type of presentation useful for long-term preservation in digitized format would be a PowerPoint presentation or the equivalent with narration, a digitized slide show of the type a field trainer would load into a projector today, or even hand out as CDs, DVDs, or USB drives today. Of course, whatever format or software it's set in will go obsolete in the future, but the point is that properly preserved digital formats, backed up regularly, can be preserved long-term far better than film emulsion, magnetic tape, CD-Rs, etc., and "backwards compatibility" is still a thing--if you want the material badly enough, you can find a way to read it (funny, books don't have that problem yet...).

Yes, this would mean the work of either redoing said shows over from scratch, taking the original slides and scanning them, etc. But if you and others feel so strongly that these programs and materials are worth saving............... (I've had program presenters already send me DVD-Rs of their shows, completely free, for showing to NRHS Chapter meetings and the like. Gets their name out, saves all their work, entertains the masses, saves them flying across the nation, etc.)

Don't apologize. It is far more important to secure your collection than answer our questions. (easy for me to say-"Diesel That Did It" review is done.)

Additional items posted this week: Soo Line, Rock Island, and Boston & Maine.

PC

Additional postings this week - many more Maine Central images. Some examples below.

PC

Answering two questions received relating to the railroad tugboat album:

Q: Could CHESSIE and SEABOARD handle submarines?

A: The Chessie System tugboats CHESSIE and SEABOARD were designed and properly equipped to dock nuclear submarines, and they were frequently employed to handle NIMITZ class aircraft carriers.

Q: How did you get to ride the tugs?

A: It started with photography for a series of tug related articles in the 1980s, and after that I had frequent requests to assist marine towing operators with photography projects. But I was never a professional photographer. The marine industry is very different from the railroad industry.

PC