A lot of us in this hobby are reaching our "golden years" as they say. Which are indeed golden for some, and not so golden for others. I'm 65 and fortunately still chasing trains. Which means my wife probably thinks dementia is already setting in....how many train pictures do I really need?
A lot of us old farts have "collections" of varying kinds....paper, pictures, hardware, so on....stuff we've picked up over the years with widely varying degrees of focus and purpose.
I would be so bold as to opine that a lot of this stuff is of little historic value, or very duplicative of stuff already in appropriate archives. But who knows for sure. I and a lot of others who have this stuff are probably not the best judges of what is historically significant and what is not.
The simple answer is that we could all just donate this stuff to various museums. If that actually happened with regularity the museum system would probably be totally overwhelmed. There would not be enough warehouse to protect it, much less enough curators to sort through it, catalogue it, and so on, much less display or shelf space. We have a lot of collectors in this hobby.
The ideal solution, which I doubt will happen, is for a few of the museums to publish some guidelines for what they would like to see donated, which museums are appropriate for what, and how to do it.
My reason for making this post is the hope that maybe some of those museum folks will read this and actually think about it....and maybe prove me wrong by actually doing something.
And then there is probably another category which is stuff that is not of real historic value but of interest to "collectors".
I pretty much know that somebody will want my Bodie and Benton annual pass, and my 1902 NWP rule book will probably have value. But it gets more interesting when you get to my slide and photo collection, not to mention my drawers full of timetables, rule books and special instructions. Most of them will probably go to the dust bin. I figure my books can go to the local library.
As somebody mentioned in an earlier thread, it would be good to appoint a (younger, healthier) railfan/historian to help your poor spouse deal with all this stuff, or to advise the executor if it is not your spouse.
Obviously prejudices, life experiences, friendships, percieved injustices, and all that will influence what we do with this stuff. But it seems to me some published guidelines from the folks who actually preserve stuff and interprete history would be very helpful.
John old fart West
