When I was working the Forreston Illinois agency relief on the ICRR in 1966; the agent had a box of stuff he was going to burn when he got back.
I went through it (of course) and found two books where the conductors listed the cars they delivered to the Milwaukee at North Forreston (Forreston Pit).
These books covered from Sept 1, 1950 to June 1952. As a near continuous record of cars delivered in day to day interchange service, at a single location, for a period of 19 months they are rather interesting.
Most include the train, engine, conductor and time.
The Lancaster & Chester had 10 box cars in interchange service and they show up at least twice: NH, D&H and other hoppers loaded with coal going from the IC to the Milw at Forreston ILL; the range of commodities from TV' coal, sisal and so on is alone facinating.

I had these books in the library for years. Then Ted Richardson borrowed them and he has spent the tedious hours of numbing work to put them on CD. (I used to balance the monthly reports and I know just how numbing doing that kind of work can be).

Ted will have these CD's for sale at Naperville and offered by mail later on.
I may well be wrong; it would not be the first time nor last, but I think the listing of the cars themselves, commodities and all the other data will be of great interest to both freight car modelers and those speculating in the operations side of things.
I am tickled because Ted has made these records available to all and the data will not be lost. I am 62 and the facts of life are that, all to often when some passes on. data such as this is lost to all. It is also rather hard to disseminate data from two 55 year old train list books very far before the books themselves start to fall apart.
See Ted at Naperville. I hope this data will be of use to many of you.
On a personal note, I would appreciate any feedback as to whether the books I saved are of use to you.

I was 23 then and still wonder what I may have passed up in that box of stuff those 39 years ago.

John Swanson