During most of their magazine careers, editors like Boyd and Sanders had the disadvantage of little or no office support. OK, I do know that in later years when they had a few extra bodies on the staff to help out, there was probably more time spent out exploring steam-powered tourist lines and the farthest-flung reaches of DRGW and BCR than there was trying to shovel out the backlog of contributor material in the office. At least, that was the perception.

I can honestly tell you that managing the incoming material, as well as the outgoing material, was (should have been) a full-time job in itself. When I first walked into the R&R offices in 1988, there were file drawers and bankers boxes and bookshelves full of stuff waiting to either be published or returned. My joining R&R freed up Mike Del Vecchio to spend a bit more of his time logging in and shipping out photos, and we later hired a secretary to handle even more of it. But it was still like using a spoon to dig into a pile that really needed a shovel. Just the annual Cover One contest would tie Mike and I up for a couple days logging the inbound photos, then several more days afterward to ship it all back. That's on top of all the other usual work required to produce the rest of the mag for that issue.

Keith, you're not the only guy I know of who has had priceless work lost in the railfan publishing machine. I hope they were not the only originals you had of those shots. One of the first things I learned when I started shooting for publication in the early 1980s was to motor drive several frames of EVERYTHING. One original goes to the mag, several others are still safe at home. But there are quite a few of my earliest slides that were one-offs, which I've been very reluctant to send anywhere. Now it's a safe proposition to simply scan such slides and send out the files.

While some editors/publishers have been more lax about tracking and returning contributed material, none of them are immune to loss. I keep meticulous records of everything I have ever submitted, and everything that's been returned (and when). For the past couple of years I've been patiently waiting for Trains to return a few of my slides, which so far have remained hidden in some deep crevice in their filing system. No big deal. I've got bigger fish to fry.