RR Slides

Hi Paul,

  I was never much of a "slide guy." I prefer photos, but that is just me. One of my older friends is heavily into slides. In fact, I believe he has almost every FL9 documented that the MTA inherited from the New Haven/Penn Central/Conrail. I may need to find room to take those some day. A few times a year, I bring a pizza and we go through his slides of such things as New York Central electric motors, the old Croton Harmon station, New York Central business cars, etc. I love looking at that railroading slice of time and all the history that I was too young to ever know. Just to look at some of the vintage cars in the parking lots are interesting in themselves, 1960's VW buses, Ford Mustangs, Plymouths (which was my first car) and more. 

  We go through the whole bulb worries, too. Usually, everything works fine. I think he gets his bulbs at one of the only photo stores in this area.

  You might want to consider donating them when the time is right to your local historical society. If the slides are of a specific railroad, they may have a historical society, too. 

  I just wrote an article based on circa 1940's Pennsylvania Railroad photos I found after someone in Niagara Falls, ON had the foresight to protect these images for 70-ish years, so you never know.

 Realistically, hard to know if there is any real monetary value in what you have, but try to get them in the hands of the right person who can at least protect them for the next generation.  For the right person, they might be "priceless."

Tom 

Paul, your slides might have great value to a historical society. In the 60's and 70's there were many mergers (with paint changes), the advent of Amtrak, the shift from first to second generation diesel power, new kinds of rolling stock (and the end of others such as stock cars), etc.  When I attend conventions of the GN, NP or SP&S historical societies, it is not unusual for us to be up late at night with the "open projector" viewing available slides.

Hi Paul,

Besides historical societies, some colleges and universities have archives that would welcome your collection. As Tom said they might consider them priceless, but I doubt that they would be able to pay you for them. Maybe you can assess a value and use it as a taxable donation.

As for your projector and bulbs,  you'd be surprised at how much of it is available on eBay. At decent prices too. We needed a bulb for a Super 8mm projector and there numerous vendors selling them.

Lastly you may consider creating prints from your best historical slides and selling them.

Sean

Another option would be to buy a slide scanner and scan them into a file or disk (time consuming) or have them professionally scanned (likely expensive.)  It think book publishers like Morning Sun or Four Ways West would prefer transparencies for publication anyway.

I have an old HP printer/scanner that has slide scanning capabilities.  It's slow and ponderous, but sometimes I get the bug and do a slide scanning blitz.

Besides, you just can't take pictures anymore like this these days in both subject matter and proximity:

Rusty

I think OGR/Rich offers this slide transfer  service. Dave G.

To comment on the question " do people have an interest to watch slides or digital photos for a long period of time.

Short answer is you cannot hold there interest like years ago.

I had my dad's slides when he passed. He had family, parties, & railroad both model and real. I transferred all of them to digital photos.

I could not hold my family's interest very long, max one hour on family photos. Railroad photos, very difficult to get anyone's interest to view them.

When we have a large family gathering, in-laws outlaws etc. I take my photos that pertain to them and their families and show them on tv monitor.

I loop the photos to repeat, it runs in the background so people can watch as they talk. That is received very well.

I photograph wildlife, I especially like to photograph bald eagles. To get anyone to set and watch my wildlife photos for more then 30 min is not possible.

I believe the age of the smart phones and ipads have taken over the interest of setting through photo shows.

If anyone wants to view a few of my photos check out my Facebook page, I have it set for public viewing. 

Bob

dgauss posted:

I think OGR/Rich offers this slide transfer  service. Dave G.

Sorry, but we no longer offer this service.

OGR Webmaster posted:

dgauss posted:

I think OGR/Rich offers this slide transfer  service. Dave G.

Sorry, but we no longer offer this service.

Darn,you almost had a customer!  

I don't have slides, but I have my grandfather's large shoe box collection of locomotive photos.  Probably a dozen boxes of them.  He even had most of them organized by wheel arrangement.  Most are early black and white photos of eastern roads.  But they just sit as I don't have the time to do anything with them.  I'd love to scan them and has them as screen savers, but I fear I won't have the time until I'm retired myself.

Yes, old slides and black and white prints - of good quality and good subject matter are always of interest and worthy of preservation.  Working with several railroad historical societies and a general interest public museum (with a significant railroad department) myself and another fellow (mostly him) went through thousands of prints (mostly me) and slides (mostly the other fellow) last winter from a deceased former NKP engineer.   Most of the prints went to the NKP Historical & Technical Society and most of the slides went to the Allen County Museum, Lima, Ohio.  It was a lot to sort but the right things got to the right places.  A lot of junk went into the dumpster but there were a lot of incredible images that were saved and will be available from these organizations.   

Where do you suppose that the Morning Sun series of color photo books got their images for their railroad-specific books - slides!

A Bing search brings up several places that will transfer them to digital, dvd or prints. Please don't just throw them away.