Crosspost from This Historian for Hire

This is a crosspost from my personal blog but as it has to do with Pittsburgh and the B&O, I'm including part of it here.
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December there are no B&O Railroad Historical Society Archives sessions, so I get some time off there.

This time off from being archivist and caterer has been good for me. I have a bit of a break to catch up with some scanning projects of archives documents, work on the web page, and dabble in some research. Currently I have an itch about the B&O's trackage rights out of, er rather around, Pittsburgh on the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad. This was a coup negotiated by Daniel Willard in 1934 that gave the B&O a really sweet route around Pittsburgh to Chicago. Low grades and good track on this line enabled the B&O to run their trains faster than they were able to on their own hilly and curvy track in Pittsburgh.

It seems this was a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The B&O and P&LE's parent company, the New York Central, both were fighting against the Pennsylvania Railroad for traffic in the area. The PRR had the advantage of getting to Pittsburgh first and was very well off financially. (This would not last) So the NYC in a move to give the proverbial finger to a competitor, allowed the B&O access to the P&LE route. This made the B&O more competitive for freight from Chicago to Baltimore and Potomac Yard (near DC and a waypoint for traffic from the Northeast to the South). What I need now is source material. I've checked B&O magazine articles, 1934 and 1944. I also have a 1962 B&O railroad report on using the B&O track again since the lease was up for renewal at that time and the P&LE (NYC) was asking for a lot more $$$. I need to go through the VP of Operations files at the archives and look at the Wall St. Journal and Pittsburgh papers. I've found some stuff in the local papers on newspaperarchive.com, but not enough. Then there is the chance to look at it from the other side and see if the NYC and P&LE historical societies have items in their collections that may help. Ideally this will become an article for the Sentinel and a chapter in "The Fiery Furnace."

A new tack...

Okay I've figured out how to attack the research on this project. It's a bit bass-ackwards but it will probably work. I'm going to have to go at this from both the Railroad History side AND the Industrial History Side. The pitfall here is to not get distracted by interesting stuff on the Labor movement while researching the steel, glass, coal and coke industries around Pittsburgh.

New!

A Jolly Good website on the steel industry.

The problem of Pittsburgh

For some reason the people around Pittsburgh don't seem to have much written about the railroads in their city. I've been looking and there is hardly anything to be found. It's most distressing.

D'oh! Friggin school work...

Classes have started again and train show season is getting ready to start. My time to write will be decreasing until next fall. Sigh.

The Gathering...

Well, it's begun. I've started gathering sources for the B&O in Pittsburgh book project.

The first new acquisition is "Railroads of the Ohio Valley" Vol. 1. I also found a switching agreement that was for sale on the internet and picked that up for the BORRHS. It may be something useful to add to the sources.

First Research Forays...

Well, I've actually had some time to start poking around the existing work on the B&O. So for the first time in over two months, this is where I am.

My first stops are:

Sand Patch by Roberts-Nice picture book, fair captions but the author doesn't follow proper citation practice for a scholarly work. No footnotes or endnotes and a short bibliography. This book gives a good visual overview of the area from Cumberland, MD to Connellsville, PA but doesn't do much outside of that.

The History of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad by Stover-A rather dry economic history of the entire road. It is properly referenced so I can get some good footnotes mined. However it's coverage of Pittsburgh is limited as it is an overview of the entire company.

Centennial History of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad-Hungerford (2 vols.)-Produced as part of the PR blitz for the 1927 Centennial of the B&O railroad this is an interesting read. However I have to be aware that there is as much folklore as fact in these books. No documentation and it was written by the company so a lot of the seemy details got left out.

The Sentinel-The Quarterly Publication of the B&O Railroad Historical Society. They did a two volume spread on Pittsburgh so I've purchased those from the Society Company store. As I'm the society archivist I have access to most of these primary source documents.

Next I'm going to use my Drexel Library access to mine some databases for articles and hit the various and sundry special collections around Iron City.