Re: Thoughts on Saving stuff

It would be a shame if any of our various collections of rr historical paperwork and items end up in dumpsters and landfills. Of that we all can agree. It does happen and here is an example: Some years back a collector friend of mine who is mostly into locks and lanterns knowing my SVRy interest said, "there is this guy (in a town about 70 miles from where I live) that got a large bunch of SVRy paperwork at an estate sale and I think to you he would let it go cheap". He gave me contact info, but I was busy making a living and put it off for some months. Small amounts of SVRy paperwork such as conductor reports, train orders and the like began showing up on ebay being sold by the guy I had been referred to. I finally went to see the guy and ended up buying quite a bunch along with a friend who had found the guy on his own. Some of the collection was sold at/dispersed by the guy at local flea markets and yard sales as well as at an antique store before my friend and I got around to purchasing the remainder. The point of this is where the guy got the collection of paperwork and we are talking several large boxes in the first place....answer: dumpster diving at an estate sale. The fellow that acquired the stuff from the dumpster had attended the sale to buy other collectibles such as books, but from an historians point of view the best stuff went in the dumpster.
My thought is this that those of us that accumulate this sort of thing such as historic paper work and photos really should make some arrangement for where it will end up after we take the final train ride.