Turn-Key Restaurant Opportunity

July 14, 2012
4:00 pm	to	10:00 pm

 

 

 

Our annual fundraiser, the Rails to Ales Brewfest, is coming up on July 14. Tickets are now available. Go the the Rails to Ales Brewfest web site  for more information.

 

Our archive volunteers have been meeting two nights a month this year at Pacific Northwest Railroad Archive (PNRA) in Burien, WA to work with the archival collections of Cascade Rail Foundation.  We typically meet on the first and third Thursdays of each month.  We’ve almost completed an initial inventory of the Nighswonger collection.  Only a few more boxes left to inventory! Once we complete this inventory, we can organize the collection, develop a finding aid so researchers can see what is in the collection, and prioritize material to be digitized. 

 

There are some important developments at PNRA on the horizon that will aid our work.  PNRA is implementing a project to install compact, moveable shelving in the archive.  This project is funded by the North American Railway Foundation.  The new shelving will greatly improve access to our materials, which are currently stored in boxes stacked in pallets.  Another important development at PNRA is the arrival of scanning equipment.  Earlier this year, PNRA received a donation of three used multifunction copier/scanner machines.  These machines will scan documents up to 11”x17”.  To scan larger documents (up to 3-feet wide), PNRA will be acquiring a used large-format drum scanner later this spring.  Once these machines are installed and operational, our volunteers will be able to start digitizing documents in our collections.

 

With the ability to digitize documents coming soon, we are starting to think more about how we will make these digital files available to people.  We are currently planning to develop a web site based on SharePoint, similar to the Joint GN-NP Archive web site.  We’ll have the flexibility to customize the site to meet our own needs.  Currently, we are thinking about different ways we could organize our materials.  If you have some thoughts about this, please let us know.

 

Another archive development we are excited about is our new guidance document for processing collections.  Tracy Rebstock, a graduate student intern from Eastern Washington University, is developing this for us.  This document will guide our work with our collections to ensure we are doing as much as we can to preserve them and make them usable for researchers.  It will address things like how we handle documents, how we store them, how we organize them, and how we digitize them.  We’re looking forward to implementing the procedures that Tracy is developing for us.

 

To give you an idea of some of the material we have in our collections, here is an example of a type of document in the Nighswonger collection.  It’s a statement of “carload shipments forwarded from” Elbe, WA (click the image below for a larger version).  The Nighswonger collection includes many packets of these forms, typically in one month packets for an individual station.  You can see that in addition to information about carloads shipped on December 31,  1930 from Elbe (no carloads today!), it also has information from other nearby stations like National, WA and Ashford, WA.  There are many, many monthly packets of these forms in the Nighswonger collection, along with similar forms for carload shipments received.  They span a time frame from the 1920s to early 1940s, though the large majority of them are from the 1930s. Most are from stations on the lines south of Tacoma, though a few are from places like Auburn and Sumner.  There are also a couple from locations in Eastern Washington, like Hyak and Kittitas.  And yes, even one from Cle Elum!  A researcher using these documents could learn a lot about the freight traffic patterns for these stations.   We look forward to making these and other documents available to people.

 

 

Contact Paul Krueger if you are interested in volunteering to help us with our archival collections or would like to donate material.  Or click on the link below if you’d like to make a donation to support our work.

 

 

 

Thanks to our volunteers we had a very productive work party in the rail yard this month!  The main objective was to remove vegetation, continuing our on-going effort to keep Mother Nature from reclaiming the rail yard. We cleared the area around the substation, as well as area in the rail yard we use for events.

 

We also removed vegetation, including small trees, along Milwaukee Road. We had planned to remove more trees, but once the community saw all the trees tagged for removal we received quite a few calls.  After hearing some of these concerns, we reduced the number of trees we planned to remove.  Two concerned citizens, Rick Henderson and his friend Jason, volunteered to take on the thinning, pruning and long term care of the apple trees along Milwaukee Road.  Thank you Rick and Jason!

 

Many thanks to our volunteers! Tom Short, Ray Ewing, John Lidrau, Terry & Marlene Wade, Andy Neault & Byron Scott did the work. Here are some pictures of our hard working volunteers in action.  Click the picture to see a larger version.

 

 

 

 

 

June 28, 2012

June 29, 2012

June 30, 2012

 

 

 

While Cascade Rail Foundation is focused on preserving the memory of the Milwaukee Road in Washington, the Milwaukee Road Historical Association (MRHA) is an organization devoted to preserving the history of the whole Milwaukee Road railroad.

 

MRHA holds an annual convention for its members and this year they’ll be just across the border from Washington in Moscow, ID.  Representatives of Cascade Rail Foundation will be at the convention and we plan to have a display/sales table there.  We hope to see some of you there!

 

May 6, 2012 is the 100th anniversary of a wreck that occurred in the yard at (South) Cle Elum.

 

 

(more…)

May 5, 2012
9:00 am	to	3:00 pm
May 6, 2012
9:00 am	to	3:00 pm

 

 

 

 

We are having a two-day work party at the rail yard the first weekend in May (May 5 & 6).  The primary task will be vegetation removal.

Come join us!

Thanks to our donors, we were successful in raising the first $10,000 needed for the 5057 Project!  Check  out the 5057 Project news to learn more.

October 13, 2012
10:00 am	to	5:00 pm

 

 

After the 2011 meet, we did a survey asking people how we could improve our annual meet.  (Thank you to everyone who filled out the survey!)

 

The top two things we heard from people were to provide more advance notice and to avoid conflicts with other events.  We hope people will think we’ve improved on both of these points this year.

 

The 2012 meet will be held on October 13 at the Cedar River Watershed Education Center near North Bend, WA (aka Cedar Falls).

 

We’re planning a full day of presentations and model displays.  Mark your calendars and watch is space for more details later this year.

 

Kittitas County on the eastern slopes of the Cascade mountains in Washington, with a rich history based in not only railroads, but also mining, timber, recreation and more, offers a variety of museums and historical sites that make for intriguing tour opportunities. CAMAH (Cascade Association of Museums and History) has launched a website, www.cascadeshistory.com to expand the co-operative cross promotion between member locations. CRF is one of the featured members. The site is a great place to plan a visit or find resources for historical research.

The link has been added to our Partners Page, and we invite you to visit www.cascadeshistory.com – you may be pleasantly surprised to find out how much the region has to offer to history, art, genealogy, artifact and industry buffs.

An anonymous donor has issued a fundraising challenge. From now through Saturday, March 31, the donor will match every donation we receive for the 5057 Project (dollar for dollar) to a maximum match of $3,000. This doubles the impact of your donation! If you are thinking about donating money toward this project, this is great time to do it.  Use the form on this page or go here to learn more.

You can read the latest news about our fundraising efforts here.

 

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