RICHMOND, Va. — Norfolk Southern has donated its complete collection of documents and archives from predecessor Norfolk & Western Railway to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, NS announced on Wednesday.
Along with the collection, which dates to the 1840s, the company will donate $750,000 in support digitization, cataloging and preservation of the materials. NS has created a special funds to allow the Richmond museum to hire interns from underrepresented communities for the next five years.
The collection includes photographs, glass plate negatives, business records, blueprints, plans, advertisements and portraits, as well as other physical artifacts.
“The Commonwealth of Virginia has played a pivotal role in our history, and we are incredibly proud of the contributions it has made to our success,” NS CEO Jim Squires said in a press release. “This important piece of history belongs in Virginia, and we’re confident that our archives will be in excellent hands with the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.”
Museum CEO Jamie Boskey said, “With the addition of the Norfolk and Western collection, the VMHC now houses one of the most significant railroad archives in the U.S. We’re thrilled to preserve this iconic history and to make it publicly available to students and teachers, researchers, and railroad enthusiasts.”
Wednesday’s announcement follows a similar move last year donating Southern Railway materials to the Atlanta History Center [see “Norfolk Southern to donate Southern Railway archives,” Trains News Wire, Oct. 25, 2021].
Would like to see where the records land around the N&W acquisition of the Illinois Terminal in 1980. I remember meeting the Director of Accounting for N&W back in the 90’s and we talked about what a “basic” operation it was.
NS is clearly “cleaning out the closets” for its move to Atlanta.
I wish Illinois Central had been so inclined. When they sold their HQ in Chicago, they were trying to keep people away from the records going back to its beginning. Employees were essentially dumpster diving to save key stuff. The management got upset and banned them from saving anything. People were kind of baffled as to why they were so worked up about people saving things that had no relevance to current operations. As I was told, a lot of railroading history went to the incinerator. One guy I knew has many of the original property plats. A lot of Lincoln historians wanted to see what records were available that he had worked on when he was a lawyer. All for naught.
I remember a transit agency was selling excess property and decided to dispose of a bus maintenance shop. Seems it used to be the trolley barn and HQ for the predecessor electric trolley line that ran on that side of town. It was found as part of the discovery that the trolley system records were still sitting in these old wooden filing cabinets dating back to the 1890’s.
Historians, knowing those cabinets would be worthless to any future buyer, it was requested that those cabinets be moved to the historical society for retention and future study. The day after the official request to the agency was made, 3 trucks showed up, loaded up the cabinets en masse and took them to the civic incinerator for destruction. A FOIA simply said they were “excess property” and not part of the sale and destroyed.
What I can’t understand is….why?
CB&Q destroyed all their records – every single one – when they merged with Great Northern to make BN. I have a step-relative whose ancestor worked as a engineer on the CB&Q and actually died in a wreck circa 1907… Everything was purged and we had no clue where he died for MANY years. Still not 100% sure where it happened.
So, in short, genealogical services / people studying there ancestry would love it if people would stop destroying old paperwork!
I am with you on that Alex, if not for a minor obituary, I would have never known one of my ancestors (an engineer for MILW) died when his train derailed north of Hosmer, SD. As he ran back to check on his passengers the luggage car tipped over on top of him and killed him instantly in 1910.
CB&Q, GN and NP wanted to make sure nothing was available for possible discovery in the Milwaukee Road Inclusion Case.
Does this include Southern RR records?
From the article, it looks like Southern Railway materials were donated last year to the Atlanta History Center.
This is great news! Too many times, corporate records vanish due to neglect.