My research on the Uintah, and especially the maps that I created for my two books on the Uintah, were greatly aided by the ICC valuations at the National Archives. The local Musuem of Western Colorado has an original set of the maps for the Uintah, and I was able to copy from them ( fortunately, as getting copies form the archives would have been much more expensive) but the written report was as valuable as the maps, and well worth the $100 price tag for all the copies, breaking the Uintah down building by building, and in some cases like the shop at Atchee, a detailed description of each piece of equipement in the shop. Locomotive and car numbers along with who made them and when were invaluable. Rick has it right that each RR had different standards by which the valuation was done, I could only wish that drawings would have been made of the structures on the Uintah. The big RR's though, utilized there larger size to infiltrate the system and add as much $$$$$ ( or details to us historians as they could), the purpose of the valutions was to bring a level playing field to the rates of competing RR's that crossed state lines ( I vaguely remember hearing from Mr. Pfiffer that RR's that did not cross state lines were not required to file with ICC ???), their accounting methods for which they justified their rrates to the ICC were based ont he property and assets that they had invested. IE the more stuff you could show the ICC that you had spent $$$ ont he more justification you had for having higher rates than the "other guy". I also remeber him saying that some fo the RR's engineering "notes" fo the maps were kept and that depending on the RR some of these included photographs -------- just imagine the fervor that 300 never before seen RGS negatives would bring ( let a lone another book from Sundance ). Rest assured that just like the "Ark" in the Indiana Jones movie, there is a big federal depositroy out there somewhere with that little piece of information each one of us has been looking for, just setting on a shelf waiting to be looked at for the last fifty+ years.
BTW - has anyone ever heard of the " Green River Investigation" - some kind of valutaion or government project in early 1900's that was in eastern Utah and Western Colorado?
