Railroad Research Partnership Day

Stanford University owes much to the history of railroads in California. Leland Stanford’s Southern Pacific Railroad Company became his most successful enterprise and transformed land and culture alike after the 1860s and endowed the land occupied by campus by the end of the nineteenth century. At the moment of its founding, Stanford as a university grew from the company’s direct influence in land management, business, and technology. Yet the school soon set itself apart as a unique liberal arts institution in the West, where railroad companies attracted much of the young engineering talent one might expect to find learning at Stanford today. Throughout the twentieth century, however, the relationship between the university and its founding family’s sprawling corporation grew further apart. The Cantor Art Museum holds one of the last major centers dedicated to the Stanford family, while other names and institutions dominate the campus skyline.

By the 1990s, the Southern Pacific Company faced liquidation between other major transcontinentals including the Union Pacific (building on the eastern side of the famous “golden spike” at Promontory Point in Utah, 1869). Thanks to Living with the Railroads and the efforts of the Stanford Special Collections, corporate documents are being opened to railroad employees for the first time in over a decade. Some of the connections between railfans and Stanford’s Special Collections have extraordinarily deep roots, so the process of making materials available has been educational as an archival research exercise. Our goals in the library have expanded, with multiple angles being proposed and developed by many actors across our field. Some railfans wish to endow donations of materials to the library, while others are interested in access to Stanford University Libraries for their own research. Ultimately, the real purpose behind Living with the Railroads is to use Historypin as a catalyst--and a platform--to serve both of these interests.

We introduced the project in a blog post detailing our visit to the convention of the Southern Pacific Historical & Technical Society (SPH&TS) last September. Several important contacts have since joined the project after meeting at the convention; one appraiser, Brad Lomazzi of Roseville, CA, has proven to be one of the most important figures among this group. As a member of the International Society of Appraisers, he is an expert in Americana generally, with special interests in railroads, paper collectibles, advertising, and memorabilia. His position as an appraiser made him the perfect person to head the appraisal and cataloging of an enormous “dump” of Southern Pacific Company documents that Stanford University acquired after 1997. After nearly two decades, Brad has been kind enough to share a few photos from the appraisal process for pinning on Living with the Railroads:

Journals and Ledgers from the Southern Pacific, Central Pacific, and predecessor companies

Original Southern Pacific Company Ledgers

"Pallet baskets" full of ledgers and journals

More "Pallet baskets"

A photo of Dave when we inventoried the minutes books that were stored on Brannan Street

Brad Lomazzi still owns copies of the complete records taken from the inventory process in 1997, so his knowledge and documents could truly make Living with the Railroads a success. The ability to blend knowledge of source materials with the techniques of appraisal could make our geospatial tools much more powerful. Since we intend to link historical documents to chronological and geographic metadata, Brad's access to encyclopedic compilations of railroad source metadata is invaluable. The importance of indexing has been reiterated by our visits to railroad historical societies during March. In particular, we learned that the latitude/longitude organization of Historypin data will not work for direct uploads of railroad historical files that are organized in terms of mileposts along railroad lines. In order to clear any confusion over the placement of mile markers during different corporate consolidations, we hope to tap into the record of individuals like Brad, who might be able to recall when exactly a valuation sketch was taken.

Brad Lomazzi's connection to CESTA is quite significant; when he conducted inventory for the Southern Pacific Railroad sources used by Prof. Richard White for his book Railroaded! The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, he really acted as a consulting archivist. The spatial research associated with Railroaded! led Prof. White to secure a grant for the founding of Stanford's Spatial History Project, the lab that has provided the seed around which the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) has grown. The story proves again how heavily indebted Stanford University is to the railroads. Just like the president of the Southern Pacific Company endowed land for Stanford University in 1892, railroad documents provided the body of source material for Prof. White's Pulitzer-nominated research and the related publications of his research assistants.

Professor White founded the Spatial History Project in 2007, and the findings from his research on the Shaping the West helped him complete Railroaded! in 2011. Now, 17 years after the initial donation of Southern Pacific Railroad Company documents to Stanford University Libraries, we hope to increase public participation in a process that has included only professors and undergraduate researchers so far. The finding aids for Southern Pacific source material in Stanford’s archive are available via the Online Archive of California, where they are organized into sections including operating and maintenance departments, accounting, secretary records, Legal files, and others. For any railfans or historians interested in gaining access to Southern Pacific sources from outside the university, Stanford University Libraries do offer seven “free research days” annually. If the full week of research proved to be inadequate, then the CESTA project officers for Living with the Railroads plan to find ways to host research days at Wallenberg Hall in order to exercise our library privileges for the benefit of railfans.

Our inaugural “Railroad Research Partnership Day” was our first major step toward reopening the Southern Pacific sources that came into the Stanford Archives nearly two decades ago. After a considerable outreach effort through emails, phone calls, and social media channels, we were able to draft an event flyer and attract more than a quorum of railfans to RSVP. Our attendees travelled from around Central California, from as far north as Roseville (where Brad Lomazzi bases his Railroad Americana consultancy), as far south as San Luis Obispo (where the Swanton Pacific Railroad Historical Society are unique for their restoration of a narrow-gauge line), and as far east as Stockton and Fresno. The Western Railway Museum and the San Francisco MTA Photo archivists joined us, as well as many individual railfans from various institutions in the greater Bay Area. We will follow up on each individual research partner as the project moves forward, and because the first event was filled to capacity, we will repeat the exercise near the end of May.

Giving our guests a site demo for Living with the Railroads

Railfans meet Project Gado and the scanning robot

Railroad historians discuss sources in Stanford University Libraries’ Special Collections

One of the ledger books Brad Lomazzi appraised in 1997 and requested for display at our event. It was burned along one edge during the 1906 Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco.

Twenty railfans, artists, and scholars filled the large conference room in CESTA with conversation, images brought in binders or on flash drives, and great feedback on how we might use Historypin for railroad history. Many members of our network had family members who worked on railroads or acted as engineers themselves, so their knowledge of operations and equipment is impressive. On the other hand, our group also included people like Brad Lomazzi, whose knowledge as an appraiser is indispensable but who has interests in railroad Americana more generally, and Lisa Conrad of Berkeley, whose “4½ Feet” project seeks to map and travel routes created by “rails-to-trails” conservation projects nationally. Among the variety of interests pursued within our railfan network, no single topic can be dominant. Instead, we hope to allow the project to reach critical mass by focusing on whatever subjects become popular among users.

In addition to entertaining railfans with robots, Leland Stanford’s personal ledgers, and a free lunch, we asked our guests to review the site for us. Feedback was generally positive, although it’s not clear that many railfans are interested in creating personal Historypin accounts--almost every railfan has a platform that works for their intentions. Thus, our job as project officers is to build structures for directing photographs and other documents into a format that could become a bulk upload on Historypin; the conversion of railroad mile markers into latitude/longitude coordinates is one way, and Project Gado is another. We are constantly exploring new avenues for revamping and expanding Historypin as a platform for railroad research, and our “Railfan Network” will be the place to test each approach. Ultimately, a platform like Historypin might be capable of featuring materials that are currently managed by retired railroad workers, making them into a form of media for other, younger crowds. With your help, we can make Living with the Railroads into an exciting space for railfans of all backgrounds to collaborate, learn, and share.

Railfan Network II: Historical Societies

The search for repositories is like a treasure hunt. Luckily for the CESTA team, our base at Stanford University puts us in proximity to a few major sources for railroad history. The most obvious repository would be here on campus, where we enjoy access to documents donated by the Southern Pacific Railroad during the company’s liquidation near the end of the 1990s. Finding aids for the SP archives are available through the Online Archive of California, where items from the Stanford Auxiliary Libraries are listed by series. With seven free research days available annually to non-university affiliates, the SU Libraries support railroad researchers from around the world. CESTA researchers are committed to opening the archives even more in 2014.

A brief outline of the different groups reveals the complexity of our developing “treasure map.” Looking further afield, we recently made several new contacts (our previous blog post) covered the incredible contributions made by the San Francisco MTA Photo Archive). The railfan network of the S.F. Bay Area includes ex-trainmen, model builders, restoration specialists, artists, and historians of every stripe. Eventually, we hope to feature every individual and organization, along with any materials they have contributed for Living with the Railroads.

The CESTA team was able to make several important connections during the month of March, mostly through visitation. On March 5th we visited the Western Railway Museum (WRM), the home of the Bay Area Electric Railway Association. The association owns a group of buildings located on highway 12 between Fairfield and Rio Vista, where they house the models, documents, photographs, and machine shops for restoration. The WRM's all-volunteer staff are comprised of retired municipal transit employees, ex-trainmen, model builders, and historical enthusiasts--almost invariably, each member has some special connection interurban or municipal railways in the greater Bay Area. Since the WRM is only about a ninety minute drive away from campus (with light traffic), more visits should be simple. Furthermore, the staff operate three restored locomotives during the warm months after April; buying tickets would make both a great learning experience and a photo opportunity.

We learned some crucial lessons during our visit to the WRM. Firstly, railfans often seek to literally recreate the operations of a functional railroad company. Many of the WRM machinists retired from railroad machine shops or municipal equipment shops, and their skills carry over into restoration and preservation. With a huge inventory of old and discontinued parts, the WRM staff are able to build locomotives that fit the very look and feel of historic engines. In collaboration with the archivists who work with document collections, the restoration projects include "car card" advertisements that deliver the periodicity only attainable through media. The advertisements transport riders back to the golden ages of rail transportation in California, and the WRM staff purchase electricity from PG&E to run the trains on an abandoned (now restored) route. The line between railfanning and railroading seems to be badly marked for some of the staff, but this is truly their dream--a place where archivists, modellers, historians, and restoration specialists can collaborate on their points of intersection while controlling their own respective spheres of influence.

An exterior shot of the Western Railway Museum.

Locomotive in the process of restoration. Photograph: CESTA

Model exhibits inside the Western Railway Museum showroom.

A streetcar from Portland, Oregon, that was acquired by the WRM as a restoration project. The authentic "car card" advertisements are visible along the ceiling inside.

Inside the stacks of the WRM archive.

In addition to the passion with which railfans approach their work, we learned much about the size, scope, and organization of railroad archives. With several hundred thousand images on file, the Western Railway Museum archival team has a monumental task ahead. Amazingly, they have already cataloged a large proportion of their collections and have even digitized a sizable chunk, with hundreds of items entered each week. The WRM is staffed entirely by volunteers, who mainly meet on Thursdays to work and eat together. While restored locomotives have lived at the Rio Vista junction depot since the Second World War, the museum buildings were built more recently, in 1985. For the past three decades, then, volunteers have met at least weekly to contribute to this sprawling collection.

As a group, the WRM staff are the quintessential railfans representing the demographic that we hope to reach through Living with the Railroads; they have an established presence as a museum and historical society, they are financially self-sufficient thanks to museum tickets, ridership, and document sales (although, as we were told, most of the documents are worth more than their cash value). They maintain a modern database in FileMaker Pro, which we plan to use for exporting massive amounts of metadata. Some individuals within the organization are also in communication with the CESTA team about contributing discrete collections from personal research to make the first sets of WRM photos on Historypin.

The logo of the Northwestern Pacific RR (NWP) hangs in one corner of the Western Railway Museum (WRM).

One week later, the CESTA team traveled northward once again. This time, we drove straight north through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge to reach Petaluma, CA. The town was a major station along the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, an interurban line that has been re-consolidated and sold several times after its inception in the early twentieth century. Today, members of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad Historical Society (NWPRRHS). dedicate their time to restoration and preservation of equipment and documents pertaining to the company. As a major member of the Bay Area Electric Railway Association, the NWPRR controlled lines between the Marin-San Francisco county line and the northern Californian cities of the redwoods. With major depots at Healdsburg and Tiburon, the NWPRR has a rich history and strong metadata for geographical and chronological accuracy. A sister organization of the WRM, the NWPRRHS is also volunteer-run on a weekly basis. Although their collections are smaller, they have a larger degree of documents cataloged and digitized as a result.

Rather than directing individuals to make their own contributions in parallel with the historical society, the NWPRRHS plans to use Historypin as a platform for their institutional needs first. Currently, the documents from the NWP live in the historical society offices, while they also control a roundhouse in Petaluma where restoration work occurs. In the future, the NWPRRHS plans to build a physical museum in Healdsburg, where they hope that the repositories that comprise their collections can be brought together. Currently, they have made significant advances by purchasing office space in Petaluma and moving their database software onto a Microsoft Access / Excel platform. Since Historypin's bulk uploader requires metadata in tabular form, this database software is optimized for our needs at CESTA.

Even with metadata made ready in tabular or textual formats, however, the NWPRRHS volunteers made it clear that finding the locations for thousands of railroad photographs will not be easy. The main problem is that Historypin measures geographic data by a coordinate system of latitude and longitude with decimals, but railroad companies generally cataloged documents according to milepost markers along specific routes. Thus, the internal organization of railroad data is a challenge in itself.

Thankfully, there may be a relatively quick technical solution for this issue in Geographic Information Systems (GIS); ESRI's ArcMap is capable of calculating distances along a singular line and developing milepost markers, which seem to be missing from most online sources including the Federal Railroad Association's downloadable data. Automating the creation of milepost markers along lines will be an important accomplishment; for example, such a method could place all of Alfred A. Hart's stereoviews taken during the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad eastward from Sacramento. Furthermore, such a tool would allow railroad historical societies to select geographic regions for their photograph collections and then receive mile markers that would allow those photos to become pins.

Workstations inside the NWPRRHS.

An authentic front plate for a locomotive, commissioned in 1914.

Inside the NWPRRHS map room.

Maps and files to the ceiling.

Cataloged photographs and documents of the NWPRRHS.

Our partners have intimate ties to the San Francisco Bay Area and to the greater State of California, and we hope to build closer ties to local groups through our location here on The Farm. The existing network is impressive, and it is important to tap into their resources while dozens of volunteers are ready to contribute. In fact, CESTA, Stanford University, and the WRM - NWPRRHS network each emerge from a very similar historical timeline involving transportation--Leland Stanford's Southern Pacific RR purchased many of the corporations in the association, operating passenger trains like the Peninsular Railway. A restored Peninsular Railway locomotive sits in the depot of the Western Railway Museum (WRM), which is a project of the Bay Area Electric Railway Association (BAERA). BAERA is a local network of historians and retired railroad employees who have sought to foster interest in railways and preservation since 1946. The Northwestern Pacific Railroad Historical Society (NWPRRHS) is a sister organization of the WRM, and they hope to build interest and expand membership in the regions between Marin and Humboldt counties. Historypin may be a powerful way to publicize their efforts and provide a "virtual museum" where time and finances do not permit the construction of actual galleries or machine shops.

You can find the WRM, the NWPRRHS, and our other partners on our Squarespace page--several institutions sent delegates for our inaugural Railroad Research Partnership event on campus, making it a great success. Look out for photographs and our follow-up blog post from this event soon to come! Living with the Railroads is still growing, and with your help we can create a buzzing network out of radio silence.

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.

Flashpoint: Hercules Historical Society

Last month, Living with the Railroads welcomed a new collaborator aboard the project. On January 16, Stephen Lawton of the Hercules Historical Society (HHS) visited us at Stanford to discuss our partnership with Historypin. A real-estate broker by trade, Stephen is a former Southern Pacific Railroad brakeman with experience in fields as diverse as land development, urban planning, and information technology. Through his work on both sides of the divide between public and private development, he has cultivated a remarkable interest in historic preservation. This led him to join his local historical society in Hercules, one of the youngest communities in the Bay Area. He has a skill set that intersects sharply with the methods of digital history, and his experiences speak to possible connections between land development, preservation, and spatial history. In honor of our new partnership, this post is an effort to encapsulate Lawton’s wisdom for the benefit of a wider audience.

The Hercules Historical Society is now a partner of Stanford's CESTA and a contributor to Living with the Railroads

Because “the crowd” will eventually assume responsibility for contributing the bulk of content on the Living with the Railroads website, we hope to understand why members of our target audience choose to become participants. As Lawton writes, he visited the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) to discuss “how one local amateur expert encountered Historypin and the factors that motivate him to contribute content.” In his case, the motivating factors seem to be tied to the land--his story revolves around a unique strand of local history and the incredible changes that have occurred at Hercules Point. At the turn of the twentieth century, Hercules was a company town of 100 homes and an explosives plant. What the HHS calls an “instant neighborhood” arose there soon after the Second World War. Today, the municipality boasts a population of nearly 25,000.

"Statue of Hercules" (1925-1929)

When Stephen Lawton moved to the area in 1991, he saw that growth and development were still taking place in historic neighborhoods. When he found opportunity to contribute, his passion and experience led him to public service. As a board member for the city’s planning and redevelopment projects, he helped introduce the first “form based” zoning code to be adopted by a California city, and he founded the Northern California Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Spaces created by the relocation and preservation of the 20 remaining powder company homes inspired him to study local history more closely. In the course of his detective work, he found fantastic photographs from the city’s industrial past. Along a shoreline literally created by the Southern Pacific Railroad empire, Hercules Point powder products once traveled via train:

"Southern Pacific Main Line at Hercules Point" (1900-1910)

"Acid Plant, Hercules Point" (1904-1906)

As researchers in the digital humanities, we value interfaces for their connections to whatever elements of society or culture they allow us to investigate. For Lawton and the HHS, Historypin documents the town’s transformation while allowing them to pursue their own questions about historic preservation. This is how we envision Living with the Railroads serving historical societies and railfans alike: a community platform that engages with a variety of individual interests. As shown by Lawton’s contributions to the project on behalf of the HHS, our model will work best with a decentralized network of individual Historypin channels. While logged into a channel, railfans can visit the “Projects” tab on Historypin to find Living with the Railroads, then click “contribute” to add photos, text, and videos. The site is now live, and we look forward to major expansion in the coming months.

At the time of writing, Living with the Railroads already features hundreds of pins and comments in the activity feed. Our contributors include the Modesto Art Museum, the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, the California State Library, the History Center (of East Texas) and Robert Bowdidge (Google employee by day, railfan by night), and, of course, the Hercules Historical Society. Thanks to the tireless efforts of researchers here at CESTA, the project now includes pins drawn from public-domain photographs in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the Getty Institute archives. To find these pins and more, follow us on Historypin, and be sure to check out the Hercules Historical Society site--it’s a blast from the past.