The Larson Collection

Nick Kallas has just returned from a trip out East, and wanted to share the story of an interesting collection of historical material recently acquired by IRM from the estate of the late Jim Larson.  Mr. Larson started his railroad career with the C&NW and finished upon his retirement from Amtrak.  Along the way, he collected a massive amount of historical documentation of various sorts.

When the estate put all of this material up for auction, Alexander D. Mitchell IV, the President of the Baltimore Chapter of the NRHS, took action to make sure the historically important parts were preserved and found good homes.  One lot in particular included a number of timetables and so forth that they were interested in, but also included 81 large binders of data on various Midwestern railroads, in which they had little interest.  So Mr. Mitchell contacted Nick -- everybody knows Nick -- and offered it to IRM.  Nick was in Pennsylvania, checking out another new acquisition, and was able to drive to Baltimore, load up his car, and drive it back to Illinois.  Nick's Cadillac was nearly bottomed out with the heavy load.

The back seat.

The front seat.

A typical page, with high-quality photographs, in this case from one of the CNW volumes.

Many of these binders have detailed rosters, mostly of locomotives, and apparently all written by hand, extremely neatly.  We found ourselves wondering how he found the time to write all this out -- didn't he have a full-time job?  Here's a typical page from CBQ volume 7.

And then there are multiple hand-drawn maps in various colors.  This is a map of the Burlington as of 1930; the different colors show the extent of each division.  Then there's another map for 1940, and so on.  We have barely scratched the surface of the contents of all these binders.  They will be placed in the Strahorn soon.

We would like to thank Mr. Mitchell and the Baltimore NRHS for making this acquisition possible.  Their generous offer to share the wealth, so to speak, is greatly appreciated.  And also I suppose we should thank Nick for being in the right place at the right time, and for his heroic efforts to transport all this valuable documentation without blowing out a tire.