Reply To: Missouri-Illinois Book information and reservations

[peggyrothschild]

Donning Publishing is located in Brookfield, Missouri on Highway 36 while I was working on the Iron Mountain book I stopped at their facility 2-3 times and met the editor and art director to discuss layout on our trips to St. Louis. Due to the coronavirus the editor was working from home and the facility understandably was closed to visitors so everything with the M-I book was by email, Dropbox or phone. I’d emailed the chapters (written in Word) to her with the file names for the photos added in with the captions. I’d initially was pasting in the images and captions but Word after a certain number of photos started to lock up and I’d lose what I’d been typing. The editor suggested I removed all the photos, which reduced the file size, and just enter the file name which took care of the computer problems.

She’d review a chapter and send back her corrections or questions in red (just like school). She had to learn quite a few RR terms the normal retired English teacher wouldn’t know (‘doubling the hill’ comes to mind). This back and forth exchange took 4-5 months going through the chapters in Word. You have to realize to I had several guys that were M-I historians feeding me information or me asking questions to them while this was going on.

I was almost finished with the book when the Missouri Pacific Historical Society bought the Collias Collection. David Huelsing had Joe Collias and Wayne Leeman’s M-I negatives scanned first and I spend another month and a half changing out photos due to the wonderful images these two gentlemen had. I made a trip to St. Louis and David and I spend an afternoon pulling negatives so I could document the dates and locations. After all and changes going to Donning I was send a printed hard copy of the book – much to my dismay the art director had cropped off most of the locomotive pilots, tenders, smoke stacks, wheels on freight cars, etc. I then pulled up each original images on my computer to see what I’d sent him and had him redo all of them. I also eliminated about 20-25 images that were poor or redundant shots to make others larger. I then got a second printed hard copy and the images had all been redone as I’d indicated. Even with this second version I had more images moved and enlarged. The third proof was a Dropbox file I could review on my computer it was fine and the page numbers were finally set in stone. This of course meant I had to reread the text and captions again and highlight words in order to build the index. Being from Missouri and coming off the Mopac I’d worked at Bismarck, Ste. Genevieve and Herculaneum while I was in the Stations Department but I’d never been on the east side of the M-I running from Kellogg to Salem so that was fun to research the new territory.

After the Iron Mountain and M-I book I think I’ve converted the plant manager into a railfan….