Don Strack's Web Log

While Union Pacific's records for its cabooses and other rolling equipment show retirement dates up to about 1975 (with some sales), the records after that time are spotty and mostly incomplete, especially for sales. It was at about this time that Union Pacific began using a central computer for all record keeping. Most of the caboose donations were recorded, at least up to about 1995. After that time, records are mostly nonexistent.

The fact that UP's own equipment records are so incomplete is sad but true. In these days of no government regulation, and focus on increasing shareholder value, costs at headquarters have been severely cut, and the most expensive cost is labor, especially having clerks record and maintain information that the government no longer requires (car ownership and usage). Cars and locomotives are merely assets to be bought and disposed of, kind of like the little car that the guy at the pizza place drives; when he needs a new one, he simply goes and gets the cheapest one he can get, and does not need to answer to anybody.

The Federal Railroad Administration still requires the air brake information to be recorded on the blue card in the locomotives, but only for the most minimal of safety reasons. The original blue card is in the locomotive cab, and a copy of the blue card is kept in Omaha, but there really is no hard emphasis to get the previous ownership right, or to get the date information correct. There is no penalty from the FRA if the information is found to be wrong, except for a minor slap-on-the-wrist of a one-time $250 fine. It's easy on the new stuff, but the leased stuff and stuff from merger partners generally falls by the wayside. And there is none of this safety requirement on cabooses after the 1989 decision by the Supreme Court that found that states could no longer require cabooses on all trains.

Getting information about railroad equipment is very hard these days. It is amazing how many records have simply been destroyed. They take up space (that needs to be paid for), and there is only the most minimal government requirement for them in the first place.

Almost everything we know about Union Pacific from 1914 to about 1995 comes from the railroad's records that it kept to fulfill the ICC requirement for valuation of its assets. The ICC went away in January 1996, and with it went the history of railroading after that date. UP has disposed of almost everything prior to the magic seven years of required records retention, and they are very focused on that constantly moving date. Now, seven years later, anything before 1996 is gone. I have seen many, many boxes with this notation: "Throw away after [some date]" with the exact date being seven years after the record was initially boxed up and kept.

To return to the subject of cabooses; I have copies of records up to 1995 (retirements and donations, but sadly, no sales). After 1995, there are simply no records available, other than whatever some individual clerk may have kept at their own desk, or in their own files, to make their own everyday job easier. As these people have retired (and many have, with several buyouts having been offered), either the person themselves threw the stuff away as they left, or the railroad disposed of it to clean out the person's desk and files. I have gotten to know several clerks over the years, and they all have horror stories about missing records since 1995.

What does this all mean? It means that current and future historians are in for a rough haul.

Like others, I have been contacted by Arcadia, and after a couple phone calls, they sent me their author guidelines. A review of the guidelines made it obvious that I wouldn't be making anything more than a good meal at a fast food restaurant. They make all the money, but...

...maybe making money isn't my purpose. In most cases my motivation has always been to simply share my research. Having my own web site works great for that. In other cases, the subject requires photographs, so I've had to pimp myself to a publisher so that they can add the needed photos, but the costs of that (both real and emotional) has nearly undone me several times.

In my case, the subject of Arcadia's interest is my work concerning the railroads of Bingham Canyon here in Utah. I've got hundreds of photos (most are 8x10 negatives), and have access to lots more. Their guidelines show that I provide all the scans, and all the words, in their format.

This means that, as others have said, I do all the work and they get the money. But the benefit is that my book will get promoted and distributed. A friend in the railfan publishing field has mentioned that I should look at this like "chumming the waters," hoping that doing an Arcadia book could lead to more photos and "memories" that could end up in a much bigger (and more scholarly) book later, with larger photos and good maps.

With my current skills, I could easily write all the words, and scan all the photos. From tcomments I have seen on a couple forums, it would be best to provide Arcadia with minimal words and clearly identified photo locations, due to Arcadia's editing methods. Since all the work is then done, I'm thinking, why not simply do a web page, with an associated photo album?

The difference is distribution and market. An Arcadia book would be put into people's hands via local bookstores and gift shops, and would likely reach an audience that a web page never would. But a web page has a potential worldwide audience. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection, and a web search site, will likely find my web page (as they do today, with over 1500 hits per day). I guess it all depends on which market we are chasing. And I still can't decide what to do. I'll wait until all the photos are scanned, maybe sometime this year, to make that decision.

In response to the above words, a suggestion was made that I look into on-demand, self-publishing, via something like Amazon's Kindle. In response I say that they were assuming that everyone interested has a computer, or worse, that they even know how to use one.

I have found that a surprising percentage of people interested in the history of industrial technology (railroads, mining, etc.) tend to shun using a computer for little else other than email, if that. That fact may be changing, as those persons either die, or become more technically savvy, but they are a significant part of the market, whether I make any money off of them, or not.

Michael Seitz writes that "the bigger hazard of a purely on-line distribution is the obsolescence factor and archival longevity of digital data. What if the device is damaged or lost? If you want your research to remain accessable to a larger portion of the reading public, then you really should consider hard-copy publication. How many folks can access 3.5" floppies, or documents stored on old hard drives of obsolete computers?

He adds that when his "local newsletter went from hard copy to digital distribution, I found I hardly looked at the thing after initial receipt. There are other things I have downloaded that I do refer to, but all are one hard drive crash away from oblivion, or I will need to burn back up copies of the information on the media of the day.

"Why not both? Web for control and continual updating, and the book for long term information preservation?"

I agree completely, Michael.

As for the long-term reliability of digital technology, I can certainly attest that your hard drive *will* fail. Make your backups now!

Blair Kooistra wrote on September 28, 2005:

. . . where it can sit in boxes on a concrete floor and rot away. OR it can be sent to a large museum or library, where it will likely also sit in a box until it crumbles into dust. Just donating the material someplace doesn't guarantee that it will be 'saved." Lord knows there isn't enough money out there for museums and such to take care of what they've got, let alone process the piles of new stuff donated to them.

I find the bigger issue of "historical vandalism" is the destruction of large amounts of valuable (to me at least!) paper material and computer data by railroads in this country over the past couple of decades. Containers of shredded documents sent overseas for recycling; the reliance (can't blame em, really) of putting all the information on computers to save space, cost, money and improve accessibility to the information. None of which bodes well for the historically minded.

Like many other railroad historians, I've certainly done my share of dumpster diving. How about the time, during a light drizzle on a Saturday morning many Aprils ago, I was ass-deep in Union Pacific's South-Central (old LA&SL) superintendent records, at the wrong end of a 24-inch cardboard tube that hung outside of the top floor of the Salt Lake depot. The stuff I was finding from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s makes me almost weepy-eyed today. Everyday stuff, like tearing down this roundhouse, or building that new spur. It was an unplanned opportunity, so all I had was a (dumped-out) grocery sack, which was soon filled to the brim. I was already late to get someplace else, and by the time I got back to the dumpster, a new one was in place. Whatever was in the first dumpster was gone. Gone forever.

My recent Ogden book gave me several more chances to see other people's stuff, and where they were keeping it. Like Blair said, in a box, rotting on a concrete floor. When I think of all the stuff the kids have thrown out after the old man died, oh my! Here's the scenario: Dad's been in the hospital for three weeks, and he passes on. In about a week, the kids go into his train room and say, "Now what?" They all know how important this all was to Dad, but none of them have the faintest idea of what to do with it. Depending on whatever else is going on in their lives, the photos, books, magazines, and other odd paper items, may or may not get to the local historical society. More than likely, for want of time or desire, it all goes to the dump.

On a couple occasions, I've helped the Union Pacific Historical Society go through boxes and boxes of stuff that gets donated to them every year. Most of it from the old railroaders in the Cheyenne area. By far, most of it is junk, like drink coasters or match books, but in almost every box there is a gem that truly adds to the documentary evidence of the Union Pacific Railroad. One recent example is in a box full of UP calendars from the 1990s. Among the rolled-up calendars, there was a calendar from 1953 and another from 1958. In the same box were some mimeographed sheets meant as a guide for dignitaries on board a business car. The sheets described the Wyoming Division in mind boggling detail, with full history and intelligent commentary about the business and traffic of the division at the time, in this case, 1963. Great stuff.

Of course, we are all free to do whatever we want with our stuff, and this IS just a hobby. But any historian (of any subject) can tell you a story of how he or she found something that really told the story better, simply because someone kept that photo, or piece of paper. We should all be giving some thought to what happens to our stuff after we leave this earthly existence.

Tale of the Lucin: A Boat, a Railroad and the Great Salt Lake. By David Peterson. (Trinidad, California: Old Waterfront Publishing, 2001. 158 pp. Paper, $16.95)

Reviewed by Don Strack

Whether we admit it or not, all of our lives are touched by the history of America’s railroads, and it can be an unusual involvement with railroads and railroading that makes us each aware of that association. In the case of author David Peterson, who spent some of his formative years on the Pacific Ocean at Eureka, California, his story began with a boat, the oldest boat in the fleet at Eureka’s dockside.

This wonderful 158-page book tells the story of small boat that started its life in 1893 as a passenger launch on San Francisco Bay. Along the way, this book also tells the story of boats and shipping on Utah’s Great Salt Lake, and the story of the completion of one of the greatest engineering feats of the Twentieth Century, the construction of Southern Pacific’s Lucin Cutoff across this famous inland sea. In 1902 the boat was moved by Southern Pacific to the Great Salt Lake to help build the earth-fill and wooden trestle across the lake, becoming the first of a fleet of both large and small boats operated by the railroad on the lake.

For anyone interested in the Great Salt Lake, or railroads in Utah, this book is a must read. It begins with full review of the boats and shipping on Great Salt Lake, including the early explorers, and early attempts by Patrick Connor to use his steamer Corrine to ship mineral ores from Stockton on the south shore to Corrine on the newly completed railroad line on the north shore. Included is a review of the resorts and their excursion boats. The book makes excellent use of maps and photographs as visual aids.

Chapter Two relates the story of the construction of the railroad’s Lucin Cutoff, beginning with the early engineering studies, and the 1900 decision to begin construction. The Lucin Cutoff was completed in 1904, and the author was able to complete extensive research, and successfully relates many aspects of the cutoff’s difficult construction features. Intertwined are bits of how Southern Pacific’s fleet of boats, specifically, the Lucin, did their part in the cutoff’s construction. Especially well done are examples of the challenges of using earth fill to cross what was, and still is, a lake that has at its bottom a thin salt crust layer atop “10,000 feet of mud.” The delicate balance between the weight of the fill material, and the ability of the lake bottom to support the load is a battle that continues today.

Additional subchapters tell the stories of how the same construction crew, and their boats, built Southern Pacific’s Dumbarton Cutoff across the southern part of San Francisco Bay, which was completed 1910. Under the heading of “What’s Next,” the author presents material about the maintenance of the Lucin Cutoff, and its complete replacement in 1959 with an all-earth fill. This new fill also used a fleet of boats, and these later subchapters relate the modern methods of moving massive amounts of fill through the use of large tugs and barges. Later subchapters bring the reader up to date with the subsequent removal-from-service of the original wooden trestle, and the reclamation of its virgin-growth redwood lumber.

An interlude chapter does an excellent job at what the author calls biographies of all the San Francisco Bay launches that served on Great Salt Lake. In it are histories of the individual boats that Southern Pacific moved to and from the bay area to Utah.

A final chapter returns to the later history of the boat Lucin, the survivor. This little boat was returned to San Francisco Bay with the completion of its namesake cutoff in 1904. The chapter contains numerous details of how the boat was converted from its original passenger launch configuration to a more utilitarian tug configuration. Its use on the bay ended with its sale, and movement in 1917 to Portland, Oregon, for service at the mouth of the Columbia River. In 1937, the tug was sold for its powerful gasoline engine, and in 1939 the hull was sold and converted from a medium-draft tug to a deep-draft fishing boat. This reviewer will leave the story of the boat’s final years to prospective readers to discover with their own reading of this most enjoyable book. The book ends with a note from the author seeking additional information, and a full bibliography that relates the author’s journey for research for anyone who might want to follow in his path. A full index is also included.

In his prologue, the author states, “History does not neatly divide into separate topics and periods; it is a complex weave of all that has ever passed.” Nothing confirms this statement better than this book. While it is the story, or rather a tale, of a boat, it is also the story a railroad and the Great Salt Lake, and of man’s crossing of the lake. There is no better history than history placed in context, which this book does very well.

Originally posted to The Streamliner at YahooGroups, on May 10, 2001

One of the many valuable lessons I have learned by being part of the publishing community is that no one gives a negative review. It's okay to give a positive review, but you will never see a negative review in any publication that has any advertisers to keep happy, or any kind of standing in the publishing field. It's okay to say what's right about a subject, but unless you truly feel that the item is a rip-off (and not merely as good as you think it should be), and that the producer is a con-man simply trying to separate people from their money, I would stay away from a negative review.

If you read an neutral review, it could mean that the reviewer did not care for the product, but had enough courtesy to not say so. Case in point is the recent review of my Diesels of the UP, 1934-1982, Volume 1 in Trains magazine. It is a neutral review in that the reviewer simply told what the book was about, and did not include any positive remarks, such as "This is the best book ever written!" A neutral review could also mean that the reviewer has no background at all in the subject of the book, so really could not do an in-depth review.

I have seen several exchanges recently about whether or not someone is qualified to publish a review, meaning does the reviewer have a background in the subject being reviewed, giving credibility to his opinion. Simply being a consumer of the product does not make one qualified to publish a review. Such a thing would be akin to me doing a review of a book about the steam locomotives of the Florida East Coast simply because I decided to buy a copy of the book for its pretty pictures. I have no background whatsoever in FEC steam locomotives, so why would anyone care what Don Strack thinks about such a book. If I went ahead and did a review anyway, it would show an embarrassing level of arrogance on my part. But hey, that's just me. Back in my apprenticeship days at UP, many, many years ago, a very wise old boilermaker once told me, "It's best to stay quiet and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Joe Brugger wrote on August 20, 2005:

At any rate, in a world of $50 - $100 books, it's [Wikipedia] a useful tool for the researcher.

Like all sources; some Wikipedia articles are good and some are bad. It's up to the reader to figure out the difference. That's what a "scholar" is, someone who has wasted enough time going down alleys to see if they are blind, and can call the bullshit factor right away when reading something.

I have known people who quote the Bible regularly to prove or disprove whatever point is under discussion, and obviously believe whatever they read that is printed to paper. This true belief is like many others who think that if they read it, it must be gospel, either on paper or on a computer screen. Bad idea!

This attitude scares the yikes out of me. As a railroad author, I am haunted by this way of thinking, as in, "Will this story be quoted forever as the definitive source?" Lordy, I hope not. I sincerely hope that anything I write gets someone either curious enough, or mad enough, to do his or her own research; either to add to what I write, or to prove me wrong. Please do. My favorite phrase is, "As always, comment or correction is most welcome." And I truly mean it when I say it. Not that I'm on some sort of crusade, but that's what I like about Wikipedia: it's open source nature so that anyone can add to, or correct what is published on any particular subject.

All my rosters started out back in the mid 1980s as tab-delimited columns in Wordperfect files. The first ones were what was used in Cockle's UP 1990 book. Next came the UP 1992 book from Hyrail, with the same file structure. By the time of the C&NW book in 1995, I had switched to Word and soon discovered that tables worked better than columns. For the files that were used for publication, I converted the tables to tab-delimited columns, but the actual roster files remained as tables.

When I did my first web rosters, it was by direct conversion of the tabled Word files, into tabled HTML files, although Word back then (and still to some degree today) tended to produce really bloated HTML files. I have since gained quite a bit of experience in manipulating HTML tables, especially using styles for the actual on-line presentation. Today, the actual roster data is in simple HTML rows and cells, with CSS styles governing how the data looks.

I have tried using formal databases on several occasions (including Access and FileMaker), starting way back in the late 1980s with DBASE II. But getting the reports to generate in a format usable in publishing was always the limiting factor. I always ended up exporting the report to a delimited text file and fixing it in either Wordperfect or Word. I have used Excel spreadsheets with some success, but always ended up exporting them into Word tables to be able to format the rosters into a usable format.

For anyone looking to start compiling rosters, I would recommend using tables in Word (or any other word processor). Using a database to too complex for the simple data we use in rail equipment rosters.

All my rosters today are done in HTML using Dreamweaver as the editor of choice. Editing a roster is very easy in Dreamweaver because it displays the HTML code as What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) tables, and I simply edit the data in the tables. Take a look at the source code for any of the rosters at UtahRails.net and you will see "the man behind the curtain". Using this combination of software makes immediate publishing very easy, and I don't have to hassle with page-count as a limiting factor. Publishing to the web removes all of the limitations that publishing to paper brings with it, such as lack of promotion, lack of distribution, and limited press runs. Of course, I have never seen my railroad interests as a potential revenue stream, which is good since there really isn't any money in it, except for about five guys nationwide. And for those guys, money is always their number one concern; money coming in and money going out.

Originally posted to Trainorders.com on December 11, 2005.

I have also been giving lots of thought about what to do with what's in my basement. I have one advantage of a family member being an employee of my state's archive department. By far, most of what they preserve is mandated by either federal law or state law. Items such as birth and death records, military records, and communications and correspondence concerning the state's lawmakers. The advantage here is that they are not rail-centered, and everything that comes into their hands is treated with equal importance. They have a nice new high-tech storage facility, and everything at least gets its own archive box, with proper indexing in their multi-layered computer database, which is also accessible by way of an internet connection.

My state (Utah) is small enough that there are three state entities that are equally capable of preserving my stuff: the state archives themselves, the state university (University of Utah), and the state historical society. all are tied together by virtue of shrinking state budgets, and management of all three communicate closely to make best use of those limited funds, meaning they want to avoid duplicate efforts.

My major concern is that the stuff be accessible from a public entity, funded by public monies. This will ensure that at least the stuff is accessible, although the trend lately with all archives nationwide makes it hard for anyone to simply drop by to do some same-day research. Planning ahead is essential.

The point of this is that my stuff will likely be donated to the University of Utah's Special Collections. But before I die, I am getting good, professional advice as to the best ways to organize all that I have, and to get the stuff as fully indexed as possible, including good summaries that non-rail people (namely archives employees) can readily understand. What it is and why it's important. Also, I am making the time and financial commitment to get the photos scanned and preserved to CDs and DVDs. I've spent the past 30 years researching various aspects of Union Pacific history, and the history of railroads in Utah, and among the stuff are the only copies of numerous paper items and photographic prints and negatives and color slides, and I really don't want any of that to be lost to some random dumpster.