[PRCo] Re: Generic Description

[Dwight Long]

Ed

I believe, but do not have documentation available here to support it, that the reason tramways did not depreciate fixed assets such as track, signals, etc., is that their accounting practice was modeled after the "steam" railways.  The steam lines had accounting methods which were dictated by the Interstate Commerce Commission.  The ICC would not (until fairly recent times--maybe a couple of decades ago) permit writeoff of track, etc., nor capitalization of repairs or betterments to it.  All had to be shown as expense, hence part of the reason for failing to provide normalized maintenance when economic times were poor--it made the P&L look better not to do it.  "We can always make it up when the economy turns around."

I don't think the accounting method of which you speak was a creation of the tramway companies but rather simply the prevailing methodology of the era.

That said, it still produced the results you cite.

Dwight

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Edward H. Lybarger 
  To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org 
  Sent: Sunday, 22 May, 2011 11:12
  Subject: [PRCo] Re: Generic Description


  The number is 621.33 -- Electric Railways.

  And I'd like to remind that there are other parts of the collection that are
  of equal or greater importance than the photos...those documents which
  explain how the trolley company was a business and operated accordingly.  Or
  how the trolley company encumbered itself with so many liabilities up front
  that it could have never been financially successful.  Think nickel fare,
  for example...they became very beholden to local government for the
  franchise grant and the guaranteed nickel fare, but this occurred at a time
  when inflation was non-existent.  Fifteen years later, when it was a big
  issue, the trolley company was trapped.  Another bit of genius involved
  never writing off all the capital costs of the horsecar and cable lines and
  then issuing watered securities backed by those "assets."  When they needed
  to raise capital in the early part of the 20th Century, they couldn't,
  because of tricks like this and because of the lack of earning power.

  No photo library will tell you these things! 

  -----Original Message-----
  From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
  [mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org] On Behalf Of Fred
  Schneider
  Sent: Friday, May 20, 2011 7:18 PM
  To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
  Subject: [PRCo] Re: Generic Description

  Jim:

  I was trying to throw out the complications.

  Ed Lybarger, with his fabulous sense of humor,  explains how complicated it
  can really be by placing a number on the door of the library at PTM.   The
  number on that door is the Dewey Decimal System number for railways.  He is
  telling us that everything in that room is one number in the time honored
  library cataloging system and by inference that the standard system doesn't
  work at all when you have 10,000 square feet of floor space covered with
  stuff all meeting the same definition.   (Actually Dewey used 385 and 625
  and we probably would not know how to split them.    The first was
  transportation; the second was technology.  Can you visualize the guys
  arguing over which is which?  He had no separate category for trolleys; just
  railroads, although the on line reference I have only shows the first three
  digits ... railroads and highways all are in 625.  After the decimal we
  might split it into trolleys.     

  Now you have to find a new system and it needs to be a system that works not
  only for the aficionados who collected that crap but for the people who know
  absolutely nothing about it.   The hired educator for the museum who has to
  teach children about trolleys has to be able to find what she wants in the
  library without becoming discouraged.   The director needs to be able to use
  it to answer a newspaper's query.   The librarian needs to be able to find
  the pictures we have from Williamsport when someone wants to do a book.
  Hopefully the library will also be a resource that contains more than just
  pictures and an occasional engineering drawing; wouldn't it be nice if it
  also contains financial and business records about the industry?  

  I can tell you a lot of the problems but I personally cannot be there much
  of the time because I live four and a half hours away.  If I were five miles
  away, I would probably be there two days a week but I'm not there.

  The ideal way of archiving collections is to put everything in a standard
  data base.   Sometimes you simply don't do what you know you should because
  you have so little free time that you must attack those things that were not
  done in any way at all and ignore those that were done.   

  For example ... my trolley negatives are there.   They are already in
  individual glassine envelopes with the negative and the envelope each
  bearing a file number.   Perhaps it is not the best storage medium but it is
  workable as long as they are all safety film (and all except a handful are).
  All have been numbered from T-1 up to T-3000 something.   There is a loose
  leaf index that describes each one in numerical order.   There is also a
  file of photographic proof sheets in order by company, i.e. all of the
  Pittsburgh negatives were pulled out and proofed and then those 8x10 proofs
  are in a Pittsburgh folder.   All the Washington negatives were proofed and
  in a Washington folder.  And so forth.   Now, even if that does not meet
  your standards, do you mess with it or do you simply leave Fred's filing
  alone?   Answer, until everything else is done, you probably wisely leave
  Fred's system alone because you don't have the money to redo it.    You
  spend precious resources on th!
   e negatives that are not identified and those that are not in acid free
  envelopes.   So what do you do with Fred's?   You probably put an FS in
  front of his number (or something else unique to help you find them) and
  then copy his file into a data base as simply as possible and scan them ...
  you make it a KISS project because there are too many other projects
  screaming for help.  

  More important might be to take all of the thousands of negatives I brought
  over from the Goldsmith and Watts collections that are mostly on non-safety
  film (highly combustable) and refile them in open sided, acid free envelopes
  and then build a concrete vault away from the main building to house all the
  combustible negatives....  Can you see the need for millions of dollars?   

  If you are not familiar, remember the words SAFETY FILM on the edge of films
  produced in the 1940s and 1950s?    As long as there were still some older
  combustable materials produced, the newer cellulose acetate materials were
  labeled SAFETY FILM.   When we moved from glass plates to flexible
  materials, the films were made of cellulose sodium nitrate.   It will, if
  stored in stacks, spontaneously combust.  It needs to breath.  If you get
  enough of that crap, it will blow the roof off a building.   Theater movie
  projectors were designed with very sophisticated light baffles so that if
  the motor quit running, the light would also be shut off to prevent
  combustion of the film.   My father remembered a major theater fire in
  Cleveland in the late 1920s.   I've been told that an entire 800 foot, 20
  minute reel of 35mm film could easily go up in smoke in seconds.   The
  Hippodrome in Lancaster was gutted in the early 1920s ... same reason.
  Eventually it became law that projection !
   booths in theaters had to be surrounded by concrete!   

  By the late 1930s we were producing films on cellulose acetate ... but some
  photographers still bought the cheaper stuff.   I know my father still found
  some nitrate base 35mm film right after World War II ... he had that 35mm
  film rolled up and it basically turned to jello.  

  That should give you a clue that a lot of the collections from older
  railfans are time bombs.    

  Those images on sheet films made of cellulose sodium nitrate are largely
  lost because the thicker the base, the more likely it was to decompose.   I
  remember Harold Cox telling me that most of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit
  archive from the end of the glass era until the beginning of the safety film
  era had virtually vanished because it was professionally done on thick sheet
  film negatives and they simple decomposed to flammable dust!  (Thinner roll
  film negatives were more permanent.)   

  So, Jim, do you worry about what Fred did with his collection?   I don 't
  think so.  It is not done in a fashion which I believe suitable for future
  users.   I wrote it like a railfan.   The journal reads:  "Company, car
  number, direction, location, date and any other relevant items we might
  like.   If I were redoing it today for a new generation of users, I would
  probably put city, county, state, date right in the first position.    But
  there is a record that someone can work with in a few years when I'm gone.


  Fred

  (Only proof read once ... if you don't understand something, ask.)   



  On May 20, 2011, at 4:29 PM, Jim Keener wrote:

  > Sorry for my naivité.  I guess I'm trying to jump into a discussion I 
  > haven't been involved in before and might not know pre-existing 
  > protocols.  I've done databasing and cataloguing of things, but never 
  > really archiving before.  I'm also not familiar with how other museums 
  > arrange their archives.
  >> 1)   The title that includes company and car number is bad because you
  might have, in a museum such as ours, a hundred identical titles.   
  >> 
  >> 2)  That description: "West Penn.  FT 3.  Connellsville Shops."  is
  apparently what Frank put on the slide and it means nothing to the average
  person.   If you come to the museum from Pocatello, Idaho, what does
  Connellsville shops mean?   But a descriptor that reads "Company car repair
  facility in Connellsville, PA" might be understandable.   And what does that
  FT 3 indicate.   Be damned if I have a clue. 
  >> 
  > 
  > While not an ideal situation, it's at least something.  For instance, 
  > "West Penn.  FT 3.  Connellsville Shops." doesn't really mean much to 
  > an outsider.  However, someone can come along later and flush it out 
  > later.  Especially if these are all scanned in and in database, it's 
  > trivial to change the captions and keep track of the changes.  Even if 
  > they are captions on paper, it can be changed later, but at least 
  > something is there and initial time can be spent towards ones with 
  > poorer captions (e.g.: company and car number with no location).
  >> A description should probably start with a file number or archive number.
  Next we probably need to figure out who the user is and what he wants.
  Does he want to find West Penn Railways?   Or does he want to find trolleys
  from Uniontown, PA?   Or might he be interested in trolleys from Fayette
  County, Pennsylvania?   Or Southwestern Pennsylvania?   All of these are
  possible descriptors that we might wish to use to help the user find
  something.   Remember guys, we're looking at this as rail fanatics.   The
  ultimate user might not be one of us.   He might simply be a transport
  historian or a historian in general 50 years from now.  Incorporating the
  car number into the descriptor might be a minor thing for the user we will
  be serving.   (I am a railway historian trying to think how someone else
  might want to use our files when we are not here.   I can look at the
  declining number of hobbyists in groups like the NRHS or the ERA and
  understand that we won't be here.)    
  > Will the database be electronic, or do you want a lot of information 
  > on the physical slide and in the record number?  If its electronic a 
  > record Id on the slide might suffice?  Otherwise, the identifier on 
  > the slide could contain encoded information. <map grid> <company> <car 
  > #> <year> <record id>.  The map grid could be designed to flow so that 
  > someone looking through the physical archives wouldn't have to skip 
  > around all too much to view someone geographically close. Lexically 
  > sorting by the order suggested would have the records sorted in a 
  > psuedo-geographic manner and then grouping by company and car.
  > 
  >> Countless hours?   Again, nothing is impossible for those who are not
  doing it.     If you have 200,000 photos that need to be captioned and it
  takes an average of 15 minutes to do a caption, we are talking 24 man years.
  Is that a safe number for the collection.   Might be.   My own collection is
  close to 50,000 prints and I am simply extrapolating from the number of file
  cases.
  >> I have not hauled the other file cases out to Washington yet.   I might
  add that PTM also has my albums already and that might include another 5,000
  prints or six months worth of full time data entry.   Did I hear anyone
  volunteering?   
  >> 
  > I'd be near useless identifying places outside of the city, but I 
  > would be able to scan and/or enter descriptions into a database.  
  > Doubly so if I could take a small deck of slides home each week and do 
  > them at nights and mornings when I have small bits of time to spare, 
  > though I don't have a slide scanner at home.
  >> Ray, a simple description is fine.   One that reads West Penn 700-type
  car on the Fairchance line believed to be near Hopwood about 1948 is OK
  until you refine it.   But it requires historians willing to write such
  words as "believed"  or "unknown" or "suspected" or "circa" or "about" when
  we do not know for certain.
  > Is it uncommon for people to mark their captions with uncertainty? Do 
  > they just refuse to write them or write them with certainty?
  >> Perhaps trolley near Hopwood, Fayette County, Pennsylvania circa 1948
  might even be better for the future user with the railfan details buried
  farther down in the description.   
  >> 
  >> Regardless, what is written needs to be correct and there are thousands
  of pictures and slides which were never captioned.  The guys that volunteer
  simply look at Ed and say what's this.   Then he throws them in a pile and
  waits for Fred to appear.   There are still going to be a large number that
  I don't know.   We need more resources.   
  >> 
  >> When I edited Headlights magazine 40 years ago and someone gave me a
  picture that they couldn't identify, I used it to fill space.   It became a
  Can you identify this? feature.   But we had national circulation.   We
  usually found out.   Unfortunately doing the same in Trolley Fare probably
  won't get us the same following.   
  >> 
  > A friend of a friend did this: http://retrographer.org/  I don't know 
  > how useful it would be in helping us though.  I'm not sure of their 
  > traffic volume.
  > 
  > Also, wouldn't it be OK to scan in slides and negatives as-is and 
  > caption them with all the information on the slide (if any) and 
  > caption them later?  It would be easier on the physical media to not 
  > have to be handled as people try to figure out where it was taken and 
  > what is in it.  It would also make it easier for the general public to
  browse.
  > 
  > I could also imagine some computer vision (CV) or artificial 
  > intelligence (AI) students at CMU or Pitt having fun (doing a school
  > project) trying to guess locations, which would then have to be 
  > approved by a human.  It'd only be useful with a reference of some 
  > kind in part of the picture, however, but there are good/decent 
  > archives of much of what's in the city as well as how extensive Google 
  > Street View is around the city which could help. Just a thought ::shrug::
  > 
  > Jim
  > 
  > 
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