So looking through GMR 2008 today at one of my favorite layouts INRail. While flipping through the pages i noticed the East Rail Switching layout by Lance Mindheim. After reading the article I noticed a industries call Archive Americas. The article saidthat it was a records warehouse. But I don’t get what it quite does. Does it store like medical records so that they can be retrived on a latter date or what. thanks for the help.
This sounds to me like a purely fictitious business.
But its not i googled it and found there website http://www.archiveamerica.com/ Well that tells me what the do, but this gives me a question?
WHO HAS A 50 FT BOXCAR LOAD OF FILES SITTING AROUND THERE OFFICE???
So where are these cars loaded. Also I found the industry on the tracks in MIami.
Who has a containerful of wastepaper (shredded obsolete documents) sitting around…? Well, there’s a certain five-sided office building that probably generates a dozen a week - but it isn’t served by rail.
So, does Archive Americas take paper documents and convert them to microfilm (or microchip) storage? If it does, it could easily load a couple of carloads of recycled material a day. Or it might have to get paper in carload lots to reproduce documents - think of court cases where every interested party has to have copies of everything…
So, what ever happened to that paperless office we were promised?
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
There’s a big warehouse along what used to be the Missouri Pacific Leopard Street switching district, with a business called an 'ABSTRACT PLANT."
That must be the opposite of a concrete plant.
The Pentagon doesn’t have a spur but it gets shipped over to Springfield VA and loaded into boxcars. The facility over there has five doors and I recently counted 16(!) boxcars spotted on its two spurs. It looks a bit like a real world Inglenook.
On maps the facilty goes by “Archive Americas” and/or “Seaboard Warehouse”. Their line of business is record and document storage, the type of which I’m not sure. Maybe they’re government documents, medical records, or other media. When I first started rail fanning the park in 2006 they took a huge volume of cars. For whatever reason rail service was terminated and business seems to be way off (probably with the advent of the digital age). Hope that helps.
Lance
Visit Miami’s Downtown Spur at www.lancemindheim.com
I know one industry that has piles of paperwork archived… The mortgage industry… up until just a few years ago most documents were all in paper and originals keep in warehouses. The law requires that the lender keep the documents for the life the loan plus 7 years. So if you get a 30 year mortgage the paperwork has to be retained for 37 years. But with the buying and selling of mortgages and having 3rd party warehousing for documents, it is easy to see why so many folks can fight a foreclosure and win because the bank cannot find the original paperwork.
On the website of Archive Americas, there is a link to Seaboard Warehouse Terminals - which is “commercial storage” and “cold storage”. Located at exactly the same address as Archives Americas.
So it seems reasonable to assume that those boxcar loads (or at least some of them) are rather prosaic normal warehouse/cold storage stuff, rather than boxcar loads of X-rays films from your average small neighborhood dentists, or papers from some small office.
Of course - it could also very well be that some of the other offices of Archives Americas gather documents by truck or van, and ship it to Miami for storage in a central location.
If you really want to know - phone or email the company and ask them - their contact info is on their web page.
Smile,
Stein
Too bad they took out the one that used to deliver coal to the “power plant”–could’a loaded on-site and saved a few bucks.
Ed
It’s a myth. Computers can generate more paper work than humans. Back in the '80s I wrote an inventory and accounting program for the stores department of the department of the corporation I worked for. It ran on a personal computer. Up to that time they kept inventory on Kardex files and made a few monthly and year end reports for the accounting department with a typewriter on pre-printed forms. They liked the way it could crank out reports so much that they kept calling me to add yet another printing function. By the time they quit using my program and went to a corporation-wide mainframe application ten years or so later, there were 17 items on the printing menu. The hardest thing was finding a printer that could print on 5-part carbonless forms (or were they 7 part?).
Can’t answer that but my mother could load one with all the clothes she buys and never wears!
I’ll tell you who.
When I volunteered at a local hospital, I didn’t want to work directly with patients so much, so I offered to volunteer in the records dept.
The sub-basement to the sub-basement to the basement had the “old__ER__ files” in it. That is where records were retired until a certain date {or until full… or until the patient “expired” {{died}} }then they were cleaned out and trucked off in a tractor trailer full to another site off campus to be held or converted to microfilm.
So, Hospitals, Medical offices, and Accounting offices, among others I am sure, may have paper files that can easily fill up a 50 ft boxcar full!
Nowadays everything going to computerized digital storage will be a different story. A place such as that will house off-site servers to house electronic records.
[8-|]
Thanks everybody. Well at least we know as much as we did. We didn’t lose any brain cells…[(-D]
I worked at a major (you’ve heard of them major) non-profit for a while and there was enough documentation, waiver forms for fundraisers, internal tracking documentation, etc to load out a 50’ boxcar every quarter. Easily.
Its also possible its a final destination for things that have already been sorted. When I lived in PA, there were practically convoys of tractor trailers going into the old mines that were full of document storage. Almost none of those trucks were fully loaded with one client’s documents. But if you live in a major city, think about how many of those Iron Mountain 20’ box trucks are roaming around. Start consolidating those into boxcars to get moved to one large site…
I meant to add that computerization is actually producing way more paper. Its much easier to make a copy of something. So all the paperwork comes in anyhow, and gets scanned into the system, then goes into storage. An