Would any SRHA members be interested in helping to catalog SRHA’s drawings by entering the pages on the different card lists into a spreadsheet? When that is done, we will link the pages from the Card List (F-Cards) to the drawing inventories Chris Hayes has been working on.
Starting from the card list for a particular car, my example below is from Card List F-70 showing the drawings for 500 40’ auto boxes. Page 1 of F-70 is attached. The columns of the spreadsheet would be the same as Pg 1. That gives us the car-to-drawings list. A spreadsheet ”search” could locate any drawing number that had been entered, then the Cover of that F-Card would give us car information. Many drawings do NOT show which cars they were used on so we need a “reverse” lookup technique if we want to go farther than searching the drawing number, finding the F-Card, going to the F-Card’s Cover.
The cover also may include the Specifications those cars were built under (those are in the archives as well).
To make the work somewhat easier, the F-Cards used a standard form for any car type. As F-70 is for a box car, the entry for “cattle bar” (and others) at the bottom of the page is simply left blank.
The first column of each of the F-Card’s seven or so pages will be different but a “cut and paste” could be done to avoid typing that after the first F-Card. The form did change periodically, think wood and steel cars would have very different drawings, but there are not that many different forms for the 237 or so F-Cards that have been scanned.
Before anyone volunteers, the Card Lists file includes 4,170 scans, including covers. While I was nutty enough to do those scans, it took a very, very long time! This project calls for splitting the CLs among multiple volunteers.
Because the CLs are scanned, they can be emailed and folks can work on them wherever they are. We just need to coordinate the work.
Ike
