New Erie Lackawanna organization

Any recent news?

They have issued 3 or 4 issues of their electronic magazine. All of them have been very well done. However, it appears their pleas for additional contributions has gone unanswered. Also, they were unable to find enough people willing to run to fill open directors positions.

I hope I am wrong, but it appears to be fading away.

It is quite a challenge to set up a new historical society covering railroads that left the scene decades ago. Once the officers and core contributors have "shot their wad" from their own collections, you need an ongoing flow of manuscripts and materials to keep things going.

As I noted in an earlier post, while there is still a lot of unpublished "source" material around, the pool of good writers and researchers who have the time and talent to pull it all together and present it coherently is very limited. On top of that, a lot of those good writers get invited to do stuff for publishers where they get paid for their time and effort, that makes the pool of people who can write for historical societies even smaller. And then you have the all-color book market, that has drained off a lot of the best photographic material over the last few years, but at least it gets the images into print, even if the captions are sometimes sparse.

At least with ELHTS, ELHS, and ARHS covering these railroads, there is no shortage of places to get a good article published if someone has the time and ability to put one together. Otto would probably welcome one too...

I was told recently that ELHTS members voted to dissolve the group or seek merger with another organization.

MX