Railroad history collection donated to library
<p>Fixing the tracks after a Great Northern Railway train wreck near Cut Bank, April 3, 1959. This photo was taken by Mel Ruder and is not part of the collection recently donated to the Whitefish Library.</p>
Earlier this week, I donated a significant portion of my collection of railroad history to the Whitefish Library. I thought it might be nice to let the community know this resource will be available there.
It has always been my intention to place this material in a location where anyone interested can have comfortable and easy access to it for reference, research or educational purposes.
The donation includes:
• Seventy books about the history of the Great Northern Railway and Glacier National Park. A number of these books are fairly rare, including the two-volume authorized biography of James J. Hill.
• A total of 387 reference sheets published by the Great Northern Railway Historical Society over the past 40 years. This is a complete collection up to the current time. Also included are some other materials published by the GNRHS over the last 10 years.
• An archive, in Web site format, of the material I have collected over the past 11 years and processed so far. For the most part, this is material about the Great Northern and Glacier Park, though there is also material about the general history of the Flathead and Montana.
This archive includes somewhere in the neighborhood of 23,000 articles and items from newspapers and Great Northern publications, and thousands of images (photos, old ads, train schedules, etc.) ranging from 1860 to the 1990s. This archive will be updated periodically as I process more material.
Later I will probably add some railroad videos and other items as I sort through the remainder of my collection.
Editor's note: The donor wishes to remain anonymous.