photo: nscorp.com Norfolk Southern Corp
The collection goes from the 1840s, material of predicessor railroads, to the post WWII era. This includes thousands of photographs and glass plate negatives, business records, annual reports, blueprints, plans, bridge drawings, advertisements, portraits and solid artifacts. from predecessor railroads.
"This important piece of history belongs in Virginia, and we’re confident that our archives will be in excellent hands with the Virginia Museum of History & Culture," said NS Chairman and CEO Jim Squires.
My comment: Surprised it did not go to the Winston Link Mseum in Roanoke and I wonder about the ease of accessing the collection for future authors.
Norfolk and Western originated as a 9-mile, single-track line in 1838 to connect Petersburg and City Point (now Hopewell), Virginia. In the years to follow, more than 200 railroad companies were built, merged, reorganized and consolidated until the company merged with Southern Railway in 1982 to create Norfolk Southern.
"With the addition of the Norfolk and Western collection, the VMHC now houses one of the most significant railroad archives in the United States," said VMHC President and CEO Jamie Bosket.
I'm very familiar with the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, it's a first-class organization. There'll be no trouble for anyone needing to access the collection providing they call ahead and make an appointment to do so.
Possibly the O. Winston Link Museum doesn't have the capability to handle the material or it's outside their particular mission.
https://virginiahistory.org/
I think the Southern records side of the NS collection isn't leaving Chattanooga TVRM (via Kennesaw GA).
Interesting that it did not go to NWHS.
What I suspect is that the records were housed somewhere in the NS management complex in Roanoke. As I recall, they are moving or have moved the HQ to Atlanta, and it would make little sense to take the whole corporate-record collection along in the move just to hoard it in Georgia.
AND they knew they'd get lambasted if someone discovered it in a dumpster.
Same me, different spelling!
pennytrains AND they knew they'd get lambasted if someone discovered it in a dumpster.
The crazy thing is years back railroads would seemingly rather trash articles than give them away to good homes. Old-timers in the Spencer NC area recall Southern Railway boxcars rolling up full of Southern dining car china which was then dumped in a ditch! Folks watching were told "Sure take whatever you want, the railroad don't care!"
Wasn't there a story about someone saving railroad documents that were blowing down the street after a railroad closed down it's headquarters? Maybe I'm thinking of the IC?
My uncle Willard worked for Shenango China in New Castle PA and awhile back I came across an "urban exploration" of the abandoned factory. In the end Shenango was owned by Canadian Pacific and there were a lot of unfinished plates, cups, saucers and other CP dining car wares just stacked on shelves and left to rot when the plant closed. It would make my uncle cry to see how awful the place he worked at since he was a kid (practically) looked in the photos I saw.
At one point in my post Army career, I was placed in charge of record keeping for my department. Company policy was that records were to be placed in three categories
Retain for 3 years - normal operational records
Retain for 7 years - items with legal and/or tax impact
Retain for 30 years/Permanently - patents, charters, tax returns, legal cases/decisions, etc
and placed into records retention at the end of every fiscal year.
There is a whole branch of accounting/finance/economics called Information Economics that recognizes that recording, disseminating and storing information has a cost. (In our case, we had a court case where the court literally prevented the company from throwing out any document - for 15 years! We were a company with a quarter million employees operating in darn near every country on Earth. We had no way to store all that paperwork internally and had to rent storage space around the globe for it. Corporate HQ had a whole department dedicated to managing it. Over beers one night a buddy from that department mentioned what rent for document storage was costing us and the number was eye-watering). So you have to balance those costs against the benefits you get from having the information.
Hence the days when railroads held onto bills of lading and salary records from the 1890's are long gone. It costs money to store things that may interest the railfan or historian but are not relevant to the railroad as it exists today. So the railroads get rid of it. Kudos to NS sending the files to the museum and not to the dumpster
Flintlock76The crazy thing is years back railroads would seemingly rather trash articles than give them away to good homes.
To give someone the job of finding those "good homes" costs money and the cost of that employee doesn't contribute anything to the bottom line. Remember, running a real railroad is not what DPM used to call "running the big Lionel set", it's about making money for the shareholders
BEAUSABRETo give someone the job of finding those "good homes" costs money and the cost of that employee doesn't contribute anything to the bottom line.
What you say is absolutely true. The point I should have tried to make is that some of the trashed articles would be worth money to someone. Dining car articles like china, silverware, linens, glassware, and so forth could have been auctioned off to interested parties, even if it brings only pennies on the dollar. It's money coming in any way you look at it.
There's probably quite a few other things surplus to need they could have sold off rather than trashing, too many to go into.
Flintlock76There's probably quite a few other things surplus to need they could have sold off rather than trashing, too many to go into.
Cost vs Benefit. Does the anticipated return from the sale of the items exceed the cost of running it? My gut reaction is that "a few pennies" is a no go.
There is one alternative, we had three plants within about 50 miles of one another. Through consolidation, that was able to be reduced to two. We shipped all that was needed from the one that was closed to the other two plants. Then we hired a company that bought all the office furniture, computers, tools, etc (even scrap metal has value) - stripped the place to the bare walls - and sold it off (if you showed your corporate ID card, you got a discount. I bought an office chair and computer workstation). In particular they bundled all the computers and sold them to a firm that refurbishes them and resells them. (It's a thriving market - even outfits like Staples sells them. Matter of fact, I'm typing this on a refurbished machine from Staples - I don't need or want the latest and greatest, so why pay new machine prices?) That's what they do for a living - they understand the market and are staffed to do the work. We then hired a commercial real estate broker to sell or lease the buidings. That's what they do for a living. Neither field was our area of expertise, so we brought in the experts.
This isn't new in business, so its an alternative the railroads could have used. There was a long history of used equipment brokers in the industry who would take your old locos and cars and sell them to another line. When that line no longer wanted them, they would be sold to an even more impoverished pike. And so on, until scrapping
Locomotives of the Southern Iron & Equipment Company: Thomas Lawson Jr: 9780966624731: Amazon.com: Books
My feeling is that corporate felt, "Who'd pay good money for used china (thinking thrift stores with piles of mismatched, dusty, used plates and saucers)? Trash it"
Remember, they were businessmen, not railfans (Which is why not a single NYC Hudson was saved from the scrappers torch. PRR's collection started out as a local effort by junior executives who hid it from Philadelphia in an out of the way roundhouse in Northumberland for years. Etc)
BEAUSABRERemember, they were businessmen, not railfans
No argument with you there, I've been saying the same for years, especially when the "Why didn't they save..." question's come up in the past.
Better question might be with the person that makes the decisions on what stays and what goes. (IMHO that person should not be an operating department person who has never done anything but move the shiny toys around.) ... Have seen multiple cases where the evidence is no longer available to the corporate attorneys in a lawsuit. The result is the railroad losing considerably more that the storage fees they thought they saved.
Ironic that the law departments often don't want old records going to new shortlines or museum archives. They often reget that line of thinking when past realities come back to bite.
I remember seeing equipment with "save for rail historical group" spray painted on them on one visit to the roundhouse. Of course, all CSX had to do to transfer the equipment from their yard tracks to the ones MRPS owns right alongside their own. So I guess location makes such decisions a wee bit easier.
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