How many libraries do you know that have model railroader magzines in them??
My experience is that only the main branches in large cities, have hard copies of the magazines. I’m not sure if they have been transfered to other media to make them more accessable. Generally you won’t find them out on the shelves, they have to be called up from storage.
I should clarify that I mean old issues, more than a couple years out of date, and earlier.
We have @ 20 branches in Calgary, Alberta I believe MR is available in them all, plus back issues which are usualy kept until they self-destruct, but, they HAD one copy of Walthers catalogue (1997) until a very wise person decided to throw it out, I have pestered them to purchase a new copy (copies) but to no avail, no explanation is given.
Only the main library, in Madison, has a collection going back more than five years back to the thirty-eight I think , but my local library has them from two years ago. It’s nice for looking up things in imediately recent issues, and not that hard to look up things from years ago.
Noah
Sometimes you find the most unusual things. The library in Sandy, UT (S of Salt Lake City) had a copy of a book on Reading steam engines.
Dave H.
my county library can’t even spell “model railroad” let alone have a magazine.
San Francisco Public Library has a large collection of Model Railroader, RMC, NGSL, and other modeling magazines. Having access to this collection is very convenient. Anytime I need modeling information from an old issue of a magazine, it’s just a five minute walk to the library. You can make photocopies of the information you need.
The public library that I go to has issues of Model Railroader dating back to 2000 on the shelf. They also have Railroad Model Craftsman but I can’t remember how many years are for that. They also have Trains Magazine on the shelf that dates back to a few years.
I guess having the WSOR yard in the city, probably contributes to the reason for having out dated issues on the shelves.[:)]
The downtown library where I live (Sacramento) carries MR, as did the Roseville and Citrus Heights libraries where I grew up–pretty much any medium-sized city library, at least in my experience, is likely to get MR. The California State Railroad Museum Library here has MR as well… (If I were the sort to end posts in smilies, I’d put one here.)
Interesting situation where I live. It is a rural area and the county library system doesn’t have MR, Trains or MRC on the shelf but they have lots of railroad videos including many of the Trains On Location series. Very few railroad books.
When I lived in the Northern Kentucky area,The Cincinnati ‘main’ library
had a few ‘good’ books on Railroads.(in the 60s)
Now that I have lived in the Louisville area for over 30 years,our ‘main’ library really doesn’t have much.
And if you want the magazines,they are in the ‘stacks’ and you have to ask
for them.(The ‘branch’ libraries really don’t have anything.)
I can’t recall EVER seeing a library with a model railroad magazine, and I see LOTS of libraries for model railroading research.
I have an old slow dial-up modem and while I am waiting for picture-rich pages to load, I am cataloguing pictures and information from the 350-page American Can & Foundry Company, 1899-1999. No, my library didn’t have a copy but I borrowed the Department of Transportation’s copy through my local library via Interlibrary loan.
The public library local history room has one roll of microfilm with 6 or so different years of Sanborn’s Insurance maps for my city— and the other towns from the same state and same part of the alphabetic listing of towns that happen to be on the same roll.
The reference collection has a ca 1950 Simmons-Boardman Cyclopedia of Locomotives and Cars for Model Railroaders extracted from the cyclopedias published for railroad companies.
And I have gotten lots of industry information by looking through the business-to-business ads in bound volumes of- believe it or not Business Week magazine for 8 years in the middle and late 1950s I model.
The university library has about 8 years of Railway Age from the 1960s.
When I want to see a really serious model railroad library, I go in my train room which has Model Railroad complete from 1965, Santa Fe Modeler and all its predecessors and successors, etc.complete. And so on. Only problem is finding room for the trains!!!
None of the libraries I have been to around where I live have any .
The Omaha Public Library has Railway Age back into the teens.
The Simmons Boardman Library on Capitol St. in Omaha has Car Builder’s cyclopedias and Locomotive Cyclopedias back to 1906 or so.
Dave H.