Ok everyone get your head out of the gutter, just because a word has "phile" as a suffix does not make it bad or dirty. I could have said book collector but I decided I would put my bachelors degree to good use. Also these type of words tend to trip people up when they try to pronounce them and I can't be the only one who experiences a bit of schadenfreude (look that one up) when I hear Lionel Strang butcher a word on "A Modeler's Life". Sorry Lionel, I love ya man, in a like if I was going to the fridge to get a beer I would ask if you wanted one kinda way.
Seriously if you somehow found this blog and don't listen to "A Modeler's Life" do yourself a huge favor and check it out although like NyQuil we recommend not operating heavy equipment while enjoying (dont ask me how I know this). Also in the interest of fairness if you dont already check out the other model railroad related podcasts such as "Model Rail Radio", "Model Railcast", "Mike and Scotty Live" and the "Model Railroad Hobbyist Podcast", they are all excellent shows and each fills a different niche in the hobby. But this isn't a post about podcasts although now I think one might be in the future.
So we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming already in progress...
The other day I was going over my hobby purchases for the last month and realized it was very heavy on the book end of the spectrum. So I went back a little further and realized that in the last year or so I have acquired more books than models. In fact it is almost a three to one ratio and thats not including the inspirational railroad artwork I have acquired, once again a post for another day. Now there are probably some very good reasons for this, first and foremost that I am in full research mode and therefore acquiring books for research. It could also be that the railroad I model has an active historical society and many prolific authors such as John Signor, Tony Thompson, and Joe Strapac. The last two have been more responsible for my latest spending than others, where as Signor is one of the go to authors for history of any given route Thompson and Strapac are the go to guys for freight cars and locomotives respectively. Thompsons books on SP Freight cars and Pacific Fruit Express are considered the bible of for Southern Pacific Freight car modelers where as Strapac's recently completed 22 volume Diesel series and his two volume compendium on SP diesels will tell you everything you needed to know and some things you didn't about the over 5000 diesels Southern Pacific owned over 57 years.
Then there are the motive power annuals and "yearly" reviews, some of these written by Strapac as well but other authors have contributed here as well. Then there are the non SP books on freight cars such as the X-car series in hard cover from Morning Sun or there are two freight car collections available from Morning Sun as well (last I checked one of the collections was on sale for just over the price of 1 X-Car book and the other one was less that the price of two. They are also available individually for around $20 US, so for the budget minded model railroader these may be the ticket). I acquired the Morning Sun book "Amtrak Across America" as an e-book a few months ago and my only complaint is I wish I could zoom in further, but hey you cant zoom in on a real book either unless you use magnification devices.
So whats so important about the books I mentioned? While the text may be important the pictures are the real stars of the show. In high school and to some extent when I was working on my history degree we talked a lot about sources. There are primary sources, secondary sources and tertiary sources, primary sources of course being eyewitness accounts and secondary sources being works gleaned from primary sources. Tertiary sources of course are those that gathered all the information with in from a secondary source; I wrote a decent senior thesis in college for the most part using only secondary sources but this would be considered a tertiary source. Thats not to say that tertiary sources arent valuable resources; these sources can be mined for leads to primary and secondary sources. One of the first things I do when I read an interesting book or article is jump right to the footnotes or end notes to see where the author got their information and then start playing connect the dots.
Returning to photos, the reason photos are important is they are a primary source embedded in a secondary source. Also while oral histories can contain inaccuracies a photo is infallible. This leads to Pro-tip number 1: make friends with the local librarians and archivists in the area you are researching. If you build a rapport with them they are more likely to help you in your search, but dont expect them to find everything for you. The archivist in Yuma has given me good information that I needed that she found during her research on a completely unrelated topic, but she made note of it when she saw it because she knew I was looking for it. Likewise I helped identify several photos in the unidentified folders as well as missidentified photos that I came across in my search of the archive, therefore helping them fix errors and ommisions.
Which leads us to Pro-tip #2: look everywhere even if you are not sure it is related. While I was able to rule out certain folders containing photos located well away from the tracks or taken inside buildings I am now just three boxes shy of searching through the entire subject photo collection in the archive (all 70 boxes). This has been a ton of work but it has yielded terrific results such as photos of the Union Pacific Olympic Torch Relay Train parked on the Somerton Branch prior to the Atlanta Olympics (Summer,1996) which would have been in the final months that the SP existed. More importantly it hae been things in the background of photos that have caught my eye, such as a long since demolished building or a circus flyer in the window. This hunt for evidence and information is an aspect of the hobby I enjoy immensely and if it stalls progress on the physical railroad so be it, after all I dont even classify as young yet to some in this hobby so time is something I have. Besides most of us didnt get into this hobby to finish everything overnight, and as the great Frosty Westering, the football coach at my alma mater, always reminded us life is more enjoyable if you focus on the journey instead of reaching the destination, till next time.