Moving Day

What could be more fun than moving all your possessions from one location to another?  The only thing better is to spend the day moving somebody else's stuff!  And IRM has lots of opportunities for that -- that's why today a good number of us put in some time to move a collection of important documents into storage for safekeeping.

The late Roy Benedict was one of the most respected authorities on transit of all sorts.  Sadly, I never met him in person, but we corresponded via email and he was very helpful with information and pictures on a wide variety of subjects.  He left his vast collection of material to IRM, and it was up to us to move it from the B&G building, where it had been moved for lack of any other alternative, to a climate-controlled storage facility nearby.

Here we are at B&G in the morning.  There's not a lot of room left.

This is an example of the detailed information that Roy collected.

There are hundreds of boxes of material, including all the financial records of the South Shore railroad.

I can only imagine the people at Office Depot were glad to see Roy walk in the door!

Or, would you like some lasagna?

Here's a gigantic ledger book from the Chicago Lake Shore and South Bend (which means it's pre-Insull).

They had vast numbers of employees writing everything down carefully in ink.

And the collection in the storage bin keeps growing and growing.  We certainly got a good workout.

Eventually all of this will be inventoried and sorted.  This might be a good time to remind you that we could always use more volunteers in the Strahorn Library to catalog and care for our vast and growing vaster collection of railroad-related historical documents of all sorts.  It's something you can do without getting oil, grease, or paint on yourself!

This all went more smoothly than I expected.  Several people offered use of their vans or trucks to help move all the material, so it was all done very efficiently.  And we were done a little before 3PM.  

Finally, a group portrait.

To save time, we just did it twice.

Meanwhile, of course, many of the usual museum projects continued.  The only one I got a picture of was the Cleveland PCC group with the second truck, as seen here.

I also went over to the Steam Shop to mark up the 309 bearing, and I had intended to take some pictures of all the work going on there, but ran out of time.  The shop was certainly a beehive of activity.  So that was another enjoyable and productive day.