We recently had several weeks of unusually hot, humid weather here, and I wasn’t able to do much work outside on the layout. So I decided to put the ghost town pics from my latest trip into an album for easier reference. Then I got the bright idea to put together another album documenting the construction of my layout, and also include some info about its fictional history and the real-life railroads and mines that inspired it. One thing led to another and now I’m up to my eyeballs in old photos.
For years my pics have just been piled here and there in bags and boxes, so I’m going through all of them, sorting and organizing them, slowly getting them mounted and put into albums. It looks like I’ll need several albums to hold all my ghost town and mining camp photos.
What really surprised me is how many interesting railroad pics I have. I’ll probably have an entire album for the Nevada Northern RR museum at Ely, and another one for the San Diego RR museum at Campo. And I have photos of the desert sections of the San Diego & Arizona RR, including Jacumba, Carrizo Gorge, Dos Cabesas, and Coyote Wells, dating back to 1975. Many of the structures and artifacts have since been destroyed by time and vandals, and some of them are things I’ve never seen documented elsewhere. These older prints were damaged due to poor storage over the years, so I’m having new prints made and also getting them put onto a photo CD.
Eventually I’d like to put a large portion of these online so others can reference them, but first I’ll need to acquire a suitable website. The Epson photo site I’m currently using has a 100mb limit, and I’ve already got so many pics there that I can’t post anything new without removing something else.