Building the Railfan Network

Living with the Railroads has doubled in size since our last blog post, and the site keeps growing each week! We are now directing traffic to our Historypin project via a new Squarespace domain. The CESTA team is hard at work developing content for both sites in parallel, with the hope that the domain can provide a place for railfans and historians to connect, manage content, and communicate. As we have learned over the winter, social media and outreach are some of the most powerful tools at our disposal in crowdsourcing the humanities. Building connections within the existing railfan community has been a major goal since the project’s onset, but the creation of our domain late in February marked the first step toward a truly comprehensive effort in this direction.

Along with online activity, visits to archives form a major part of our recent progress as a team. We gained three partners during as many weeks: the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency’s Photo Archive, the Western Railway Museum in Solano County, and the Northwestern Pacific Railroad Historical Society in Petaluma, CA. Each organization has unique points of intersection with our mission, but we hope that they can all play important roles because of their proximity to Stanford Campus and to the greater railfan network of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Perhaps the most tech-savvy of the three institutions, the SFMTA Photo Archive is in reality a small group of archivists plying their trade over a historical treasure trove. Deep in the basement of the MTA headquarters--the archive is not open to the public except by appointment--head archivist Heather Moran directs an impressive operation. One might not assume that some of the best work done yet on Historypin is done beneath the intersection of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue in downtown San Francisco, but there lies the home of the SFMTA Photo channel.

Boasting hundreds of pins, a Photoshelter site for browsing collections of hi-res imagery, and an active social media presence (@SFMTAPhoto on Twitter), the San Francisco MTA has a fascinating array of materials available online for history buffs and railfans alike. In their capacity as an archive for an entire city’s transit history, Moran and her team have found opportunities to publicize their efforts in unique ways. In celebration of MUNI’s 100th birthday in 2012, they rolled out their “Treasures from the MUNI Archive” collection, a project which featured posters in transit shelters showing historic views of those same shelters from Historypin. In this way, “Treasures” turned the city into a literal gallery of historic photos--a realistic version of the street view function online.

The SFMTA Photo team makes great use of the Tours and Collections as well, with images from “Treasures” comprising several distinct tours alone. Their work shows the diverse ways in which the same functions could be used by other project contributors. The MTA will make a strong partner on Historypin, Twitter, and in person: Heather has also agreed to bring materials for display at our upcoming Railroad Research Partnership Day. With “Treasures” as an example, we hope that CESTA and the Stanford Archive can create live galleries to mirror our accomplishments on Historypin, and vice-versa. Below are three copies of images contributed by the San Francisco MTA Photo Archive on Historypin:

"Southern Pacific Railroad Locomotive 139 | M1817_16 | | Marshall Moxom Muni Photographer" (1974)

"Southern Pacific Railroads bridge over Army Street (Cesar Chavez) | M2367_2 | Marshall Moxom" (1977)

"Western Pacific locomotive 1502 crosses the tracks under Freeway 280 | M1817_2 | Marshall Moxom" (1974)

The San Francisco MTA contributes to multiple projects from their own Historypin channel (see more of their pins on our sister project, Year of the Bay). Their positioning makes them a great candidate for inclusion with Living with the Railroads, directly and without many offline tasks. Other groups, however, will not always be so well-prepared for the transitions from physical to digital to online archives.

The most important institutional category will be comprised of railroad historical societies such as the Western Railway Museum (WRM) and Northwestern Pacific Railroad Historical Society (NWPRRHS). Our next post will explore the complexities of interacting with these two organizations, where hundreds of thousands of images and documents are curated by dedicated ex-employees of railroad companies who volunteer in retirement. We hope to find individuals among their membership who curate collections that can be uploaded to Historypin in bulk. There is also great potential for building connections, an effort we have placed under the section “Railfan Network” on Squarespace. We envision this as a place for railroad historians to connect over mutual interests, share the contents of their institutional archives, and collaborate online.