Railroad Forums 

Discussion relating to the B&O up to it's 1972 merger into Chessie System. Visit the B&O Railroad Historical Society for more information. Also discussion of the C&O up to 1972. Visit the C&O Historical Society for more information. Also includes the WM up to 1972. Visit the WM Historical Society for more information.
 #662  by BR&P
 
We had a lot of good info on the BR&P on the old forum. Too bad it got wiped out. Maybe that will teach me to print off things I want to hang on to, rather than just figure they're on the web site. Anyway, here's the start of a new thread on this site.

Think I asked this question before, either on the BR&P Yahoo group or here, but no answers. Anybody know of the disposition of the BR&P private office cars, and/or the Rochester & Pittsburgh Coal Company's private car, "THE RUTH" ? Presumably the BR&P's cars went to the B&O at takeover. Anything from there?

 #4663  by hutton_switch
 
Wade Rice (hutton_switch) from Alexandria, VA back here again. I was moderator under this forum in its old format, and have yet to get over the loss of all that valuable information posted. I feel particularly for one individual who posted here regularly, Brian DeVries (BR&P Pickup), who had posted a lot of information on the old BR&P that was taken over by the B&O in 1932, and I'm sure he's really mourning that loss as well, and to the best of my knowledge, he will likely not be returning, but I could be wrong.

To prevent the loss of such valuable information in the future, I feel it is too much to ask of moderator(s) of any forum to regularly back up all of the information individuals post, unless they want to take on that responsibility. I'm not sure what the RR.net owners are doing to archive information, other than maybe a regular system backup based on technical failure. That doesn't address the loss of information, or more importantly, conversion of it to be accessible for future inquiries or research, whenever a new system upgrade is launched, as has just happened. Also, I see no provision of a method for posting archival information to a "Files" or "Photos" section like the forums in Yahoo! allow. And last, but not least, we have no guarantee that something like what has just happened will not occur again in the future.

In light of all this, the best "do-able" thing I believe that could be done is for interested individuals to back up whateve they can of this valuable historical information on their own to ASCII text files (*.txt) for long-term archival retrieval. The problem would then be how to make the information available again from those private individuals to the rest of the forum members.

If you have gotten this far, thanks for reading it and listening to me rant and rave a bit on what I feel is a big loss.
 #7062  by WNYRailfan
 
I guess that teaches us to print out more often. But I will admit as being the one who originally posted the Highlights of the BR&P topic in the New York State Railfan forum on the old board, I had 75 replies and never printed them out because I read them and figured they would be there in May when I will be out of college and needed to reread them.

But they are now somewhere on some old server that is dormant. Oh to make things worse, I also lost my moderator tag when the old system was shut down. :(

WNYRailfan