Dave Nelson wrote:

Ok, here's what I was thinking . . .

Is it do-able? Would it be worthwhile? Would it be excessively burdonsome
to create and edit? I dunno.

I think this is a pretty practical break-down of what we would want. Whether it's "burdensome" or not is hard to say. The reason we don't have a FAQ file for this list is that no one has stepped forward to create, organize and maintain one--a truly big job, as I know from having just HELPED with one on another list--and perhaps the same could arise with a STMFC Wiki. Anyone want to give it a try?

Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, thompson@...
Publishers of books on railroad history

From: Anthony Thompson <thompson@...>

no one has stepped forward
to create, organize and maintain one--a truly big job, as I know from
having just HELPED with one on another list--and perhaps the same could
arise with a STMFC Wiki. Anyone want to give it a try?


I nominate Dave Nelson to head this project up since he apparently has the interest and enthusiasm to see it through.

I also nominate Tim Gilbert to help him.

And, so it doesn't seem that I'll passing the buck (too much) I'll be happy to include any and information needed for the Central Vermont listing. I nominate Tony Thompson to handle the SP and Richard for the ATSF . . . wow, this is a easier than I thought it would be . . .

Marty McGuirk -- enjoying the sight of the nation's capital from my office across the river . . . with the windows open and bright sunlight streaming in . . .

And, so it doesn't seem that I'll passing the buck (too much) I'll be happy to include any and information needed for the Central Vermont listing. I nominate Tony Thompson to handle the SP and Richard for the ATSF . . . wow, this is a easier than I thought it would be . . .

Oh what the heck - I'll do the O&W for you.

Bill Schneider
Enjoying the sites and smells of beautiful downtown East Hartford - with the windows closed.

As Dave Nelson suggests, an HTML version of an ORER would be
a fabulous "anchor" for any freight cars related 'Wiki'. We've
talked about this for 10 years off and on, and I would guess it
would be an enormous amount of work just to create the HTML ORER.
It also has to be hosted somewhere, which means file space (cheap)
and bandwidth (not so cheap).

Some capabilities are only practical on the "back-end" -- i.e.
the hosted web site, not the client browser. For example, the
host could create an index using Google tools and this can be
made available to browsers. Also, the host site could hyperlink
ORER entries via dimensional or other data, so for example if I
click on the CUBIC FEET entry of "3713" it could pull up a list
of all freight cars with 3713 cft capacity -- the 1937 AAR cars.

A specialized search index could be created from the HTML source,
that would allow one to search on "SP 309129" and pull up the
appropriate ORER entry, even though that particular car number
may not be listed individually. The key is having an HTML version
of the ORER.

Once in place, the 'Wiki' could be annotated (with hyper links)
to an almost infinite degree. Some person or persons would have
to validate new contributions (as Wikipedia does) or the site
could be totally destroyed by web-bots not to mention just plain
old bogus information.

I would gladly contribute scans from my own photos and magazine
and book references for freight cars that I know about. I have
long thought that this is the most sensible approach for us to
organize freight car information. It's worked for real railroads
for over 100 years! (Of course they now have UMLER which gives
them real time information too.)

We have to recognize that magazine articles pay $100 or more
for every page published to the authors. A Wiki-ORER represents
potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of free labor! Some
subscription system may be necessary to pay for its upkeep and
perhaps provide (very nominal) compensation for original material.

Tim O'Connor

P.S. Incredible examples of freely offered labor is Tom Madden's
Pullman CCR database, and many other excellent lists produced by
other members of the PassengerCarList. Tom's database is actually
a spreadsheet and so could be readily incorporated into a web site
if someone wanted to spend hundreds of hours doing it, and if Tom
allowed it.

mjmcguirk@... wrote:

From: Anthony Thompson <thompson@...>

no one has stepped forward
to create, organize and maintain one--a truly big job, as I know from
having just HELPED with one on another list--and perhaps the same could
arise with a STMFC Wiki. Anyone want to give it a try?


I nominate Dave Nelson to head this project up since he apparently has the interest and enthusiasm to see it through.

I also nominate Tim Gilbert to help him.

And, so it doesn't seem that I'll passing the buck (too much) I'll be happy to include any and information needed for the Central Vermont listing. I nominate Tony Thompson to handle the SP and Richard for the ATSF . . . wow, this is a easier than I thought it would be . . .

Marty McGuirk -- enjoying the sight of the nation's capital from my office across the river . . . with the windows open and bright sunlight streaming in . . .

Marty,

Are you buying lunch Saturday?

I have done all-time rosters for the B&M: - one between 1930 and 1994; and the other from B&M's 6/30/1914 Valuation Report through 12/31/1955. The prime source for both were ORER's in roughly five to six year segments with B&M Freight Car Class Card Diagrams & Data as a supplement. These rosters did not include paint scheme data; these I prefer to cover generally as to when reporting marks and stenciling formats changed as well as colors, heralds and slogans in a chronological time line. Some of the "paint data" was printed in the B&MRRHS' Modelers Notes #101 although I omitted the exotica, experimental and trivial in that discussion.

Feeling brilliant after those endeavours, I decided to tackle the New York Central armed with the ORER's and NYC's Freight Car Diagrams. Here, I was bombarded with changing Lot Numbers, rebuilds, renumberings, changing Mechanical Designations, etc.. It seemed that from the footnotes from the ORER's that the NYC assigned some freight car number series to the auto plants rather than car types. I gave up - Jeff English who forgotten more about the NYC than I will ever know said I was foolish to even try such a task. Upon further review, an all-time roster (1914-1960) of the Central may be a lot more complicated than a similar one for the PRR and, perhaps any other road - and not only because of NYC's Lot system. (I am omitting consideration of an all-time roster of the private owners including shipper's, tank and refrigerator lines.)

Dave Nelson has transcribed a 1950 ORER into a computerized data base which is a massive task by itself. Anybody volunteer to do a 1955, 1960, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1935, 1940, 1945 one, too so that changes in car numbers, ownership, retirements, acquisitions can be traced? (Before 1915, the ORER's would be fairly useless because the standardized format was adopted, I believe, only after the 1911 Federal Railway Safety Act.)

So I think that the group is not interested in all-time rosters, but would be more interested in a chronological time line of when colors, herald, slogans, data requirements changed for each road. (e.g. Between what dates and to what cars did the NYC apply the black background to the NYC oval?) Exotic schemes such as SP's orange bracing on the red oxide Overnight cars which Tony Thompson showed in the proofs to his SP Boxcar book in Cocoa Beach could be excluded - the Group should be interested in the usual which was often mundane - and probably not marketable to the "bozos" who may be classified as "aficionados of the esoteric."

Not promising anything now, Tim Gilbert

If the "mood" is to create an "all-time" Freight Car data base, a way to start would be to use the New Freight Car listings in the first issue of each year's RAILWAY AGE. That data would have to be matched with a contemporary ORER to determine the car series numbers, mechanical designations and dimensions. Succeeding ORER's in roughly five year intervals would then be examined to note the quantities of cars, as well changes in mechanical designations, dimensions, conversions and renumberings. At a certain point, the car series would no longer be listed - therefore, providing the last year of service of that car series.

What would be missing from this data base? Used Car Sales to other roads? Some renumberings & conversions (into other car types)? I believe that RAILWAY AGE's lists included cars built in Company's Shops.

I believe Eric Neubauer has collected a list of "New Cars a la RAILWAY AGE." If not, it would be a relatively simple task for the idle in the now sunny Washington DC on an inclement day to photocopy these issues at the Library of Congress. The photocopies could then be transcribed and compared to contemporary ORER's - the most complete set of ORER's I know of are in Sacramento.

How's that for delegating?

Tim Gilbert

Tim Gilbert wrote

If the "mood" is to create an "all-time" Freight Car data base ...
What would be missing from this data base? Used Car Sales to other
roads? Some renumberings & conversions (into other car types)?

Tim, you are thinking two dimensionally. Try thinking 4 dimensionally!
A Wiki consists of 2-dimensional pages that are hyperlinked thru space
(3D) and time (4D). When I pull up a WIKI-ORER entry for a particular
year, I should be able to trace the origins and dispositions of those
cars by sliding backward and forward through time-links, and I should
be able to find related prototype and model information by type-links.
Once we understand the -layout- of the ORER pages, we can automate the
linkages according to the type of information in each area of the page.
Of course, people with browsers don't know any of this -- they just
click on entries and are transported magically to relevant content.

And NOTE -- a Wiki is a framework, not a database. The database hangs
off the framework -- which is how it is able to grow from nothing into
a huge encyclopedia. So don't think of Eric's or Tony's or Ted's data
as being the foundation. Those are just a few sources in a very wide
spectrum of expertise, and a Wiki can tap the full spectrum. That is
why it is so powerful and why it can grow exponentially.

Tim O'Connor

Tim O'Connor wrote:

... and I would guess it would be an
enormous amount of work just to create the HTML ORER.

Why?

If you approach the problem as "What is the best std structure to present
this common data?" and then answereed that question... Then wouldn't it be
rather straight forward to write one perl script that read the ascii ORER
and formatted it per the "Std" in html (I must note here that I am not a
perl or html programmer... I'm a data architect)? In a similar manner, a
"Std." data collection format, such as a nicely formatted Excel spreadsheet,
fixes the inputs to those scripts WRT new content.

I know from the experience of transcribing a second ORER that such an
approach calls for vastly less work than doing everything from scratch.

It also has to be hosted somewhere, which means file space (cheap)
and bandwidth (not so cheap).

True. So here's where my ignornace shows: Where is the Wikipedia stuff
stored?

Dave Nelson

Tim Gilbert wrote:

Feeling brilliant after those endeavours, I decided to tackle the New
York Central armed with the ORER's and NYC's Freight Car Diagrams.
Here, I was bombarded with changing Lot Numbers, rebuilds,
renumberings, changing Mechanical Designations, etc.. It seemed that
from the footnotes from the ORER's that the NYC assigned some freight
car number series to the auto plants rather than car types. I gave up
- Jeff English who forgotten more about the NYC than I will ever know
said I was foolish to even try such a task.

I dabbled with the same idea and also went to Jeff to confirm my suspicion
that the problem is a many to many relationship -- one Car Lot, on an
As-Built basis, might be found in multiple car series in the ORER. On some
later date one or more of those car series get combined with like cars from
a different Car Lot and renumbered so now one lot has many car series and
one car series has many lots.

There is a simple technical solution (non-excel based) to that but I
concluded it requires far more effort to set up and capture the answer than
the end result was worth. Now perhaps w/ a dozen or more ORER sets, it
would be, but in the 1-3 range it, IMO, isn't.

Dave Nelson

Gene Green wrote:

An acquaintance of mine (I say acquaintance because if he ever
learns I have revealed what I am about to reveal he and I won't be
friends anymore) has been working for many years on an "all-time"
roster of box cars built from about 1910 through about 1940 plus any
box cars built before 1910 that later got steel underframes plus some
other box cars from either before 1910 or after 1940 that interest
him.

I'll wager Gene that your buddy was an avid buyer on eBaY five years ago and
as I recall paid quite large sums for both both ORER's and CBC's. His
"About Me" page on eBay explained it all -- still there if you know where to
look.

Dave Nelson

Tim Gilbert wrote (in minor part):

Exotic schemes such as SP's orange bracing on the red
oxide Overnight cars which Tony Thompson showed in the proofs to his SP
Boxcar book in Cocoa Beach could be excluded . . .

Something has gone wrong with this info, Tim. Before WW II the SP "Overnight" cars were black (not oxide red) with orange trim striping and lettering. Braces were black like the rest of the car. The famous postwar black scheme had no orange on it, nor any braces.
The prewar scheme is indeed "exotic" in the sense that it was restricted to 1936-1942 and in that it was used for cars INTENDED to stay on-line, and of course in that it was applied to less than 500 cars. But it is not bogus or somehow fictional. SP modelers of that particular era probably would love to do, and legitimately could do, cars in that scheme. The rest of us would have to cook up a museum scene or equivalent.

Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, thompson@...
Publishers of books on railroad history

Tim Gilbert wrote:

Dave Nelson has transcribed a 1950 ORER into a computerized data base
which is a massive task by itself. Anybody volunteer to do a 1955,
1960, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1935, 1940, 1945 one, too so that changes in
car numbers, ownership, retirements, acquisitions can be traced?

Tim, I think you've failed to understand your question will be read not much
differently than "Anybody want to eat these 3 whales for lunch?". And
they'd be right too.

FWIW the trick, if you can call it that, is to edit a copy of an existing
ascii ORER, updating the car quantities and adding or deleting a few lines
that represent series additions or deletions. Obviously the farther away in
time you go the more work it is. My own testing of this approach is on a
1948 ORER and I'd say the work to create it from a 1950 ORER is about 5% of
doing the original.

Dave Nelson

But Dave, this is why your idea of the Wiki database is perfect. You
can hyperlink until the cows come home -- or rather, a person who cares
enough about a particular prototype to contribute some information, can
add his data to the existing data set... Multiply that effort by many
hundreds of people, and it's not so awful to consider.

I have this beautiful handout on B&O box cars from Chris Barkan. I'd
ask him first, but I'd love to see that information scanned and shown
to HO modelers of the 30's to 60's because it's an amazing data set.
And it would be instructive because almost every car is linked to
several number series and even car classes, including rebuilds and
re-rebuilds.

Tim O'Connor

To answer your Wikipedia question: it's based in Belgium, is
supported by contributions, and the home page contains links
to a wealth of self-descriptive information about it and the
contributors. Many people have donated thousands of hours of
labor -- and from the logs you can see constant maintenance and
protection from VANDALS.

Dave, my approach would be to scan an entire ORER using OCR
software. Each page of the ORER would become a page entry in
an electronic "book" of HTML pages. You're right, scripts
would then run over these scanned pages to parse and convert
them into hyperlinked HTML structures. I could do this kind
of work and I'm sure many other people can too, but doing all
this would be a huge amount of labor, but necessary if the
totality is to become a living Wiki and outlast us... think
"permanent train club" of people interested in creating and
maintaining such a resource, instead of building a layout. It
has been tried many times, sometimes privately like Gene's
friend and often publicly like Tom Madden's data, or for sale
like Eric Neubauer's ebooks -- but they all have in common a
great deal of labor.

It used to be stuff was either printed on paper or film or
tape and that was that. You got a copy and put it on a shelf.
I don't think we have a handle yet on the potential lifespan
of online electronic resources... or how to preserve them as
living public resources.

Is there already a Yahoo group looking at this kind of stuff?

Tim O'Connor

Tim O'Connor wrote:
"I have this beautiful handout on B&O box cars from Chris Barkan. I'd
ask him first, but I'd love to see that information scanned and shown
to HO modelers of the 30's to 60's because it's an amazing data set.
And it would be instructive because almost every car is linked to
several number series and even car classes, including rebuilds and
re-rebuilds."

A comprehensive calldown of the PRR boxcar fleet linking classes and
car series including rebuilds and re-rebuilds has been available
online for over a month, free of charge, in the January and February
issues of The Keystone Modeler as the first two parts of an ongoing
series on PRR boxcars:
<http://www.prrths.com/Keystone%20Modeler/Keystone_Modeler_PDFs/TKM%
20No.%2030%2001-06%20PDF.pdf>
<http://www.prrths.com/Keystone%20Modeler/Keystone_Modeler_PDFs/TKM%
20No.%2031%2002-06%20PDF.pdf>

Additional summaries for flatcars and gons were done by Elden
Gatwood in the introductory articles for both series.

I'm working on a sand chart to better illustrate class sizes which
will appear in the May or June issue of TKM. The next class to be
covered is Class XL, with the prototype article coming in April and
the modeling article in May.

The B&O Modeler would be a great forum to get Chris' handout on the
streets - it would be progress more tangible than endless debate
over who gets stuck starting and maintaining a freight car wiki.


Ben Hom

Tim O'Connor wrote:

Dave, my approach would be to scan an entire ORER using OCR
software. Each page of the ORER would become a page entry in
an electronic "book" of HTML pages. You're right, scripts
would then run over these scanned pages to parse and convert
them into hyperlinked HTML structures. I could do this kind
of work and I'm sure many other people can too, but doing all
this would be a huge amount of labor, but necessary if the
totality is to become a living Wiki and outlast us... think
"permanent train club" of people interested in creating and
maintaining such a resource, instead of building a layout. It
has been tried many times, sometimes privately like Gene's
friend and often publicly like Tom Madden's data, or for sale
like Eric Neubauer's ebooks -- but they all have in common a
great deal of labor.

It used to be stuff was either printed on paper or film or
tape and that was that. You got a copy and put it on a shelf.
I don't think we have a handle yet on the potential lifespan
of online electronic resources... or how to preserve them as
living public resources.

Is there already a Yahoo group looking at this kind of stuff?

Tim O'Connor

One major problem with "online" references is they can come and go, at
the whim of the person hosting the web site. I have seen a number of
great resources on the Southern Pacific vanish from cyberspace with out
any warning. We were really lucky that Richard Percy decided to bring
his "My Espee Modelers Home Page" back, after he removed it. We have
lost others.

--
--
Peter J. McClosky
Formerly of Los Angeles, CA
Now Living in Eugene, Oregon
http://home.earthlink.net/~pmcclosky
pmcclosky@...

That's exactly right Pete. That is why I suggested a club (in the legal
and fraternal senses) with dues and a formal structure/incorporation
like any other train club. The club would own the rights so no person
would be able to shut it down. I wouldn't waste my time working on
a web site without that protection. Like I said -- building a web site
could be as good as building a layout, and perhaps would outlast
us all.

Tim O.

--- In STMFC@..., "Peter J. McClosky" <pmcclosky@...> wrote:

One major problem with "online" references is they can come and go, at
the whim of the person hosting the web site. I have seen a number of
great resources on the Southern Pacific vanish from cyberspace with out
any warning.

Right. Paper is forever! (Almost.)

Walt Lankenau

Not only is paper not forever (because we are not archivists) but
it is heavy, expensive, static (unchanging), very difficult to correct
or update, eats up space, sprouts mildew... Did I mention heavy
and expensive?

If you want a static copy of a website, just get a big disk drive and
download the whole kit & kaboodle! (I have done it with a number
of popular sites for the exact reason that I don't know how long the
owner will keep it running.)

Right. Paper is forever! (Almost.)

Walt Lankenau

Until you die, and the kids put it at the curb, or until the library throws it out as "nobody's
interested in this any more . . ."

SGL