A $5,000 grant from the National Railway Historical Society has been awarded to the Friends of the East Broad Top, Inc. to support the “East Broad Top Railroad Archives and Special Collections Secure Storage Project.”
The funding will enable the initial procurement of basic storage shelves to outfit the new EBT archives headquarters to be established in Mount Union, PA. This new space in the city that was the EBT’s historic northern terminus will complement the Mount Union Area Historical Society and the Bricktown Model Railroaders Association, which also preserve the community’s railroad and manufacturing cultural heritage. “This generous grant will help outfit our new space with quality archival housing and storage equipment,” said Andy van Scyoc, FEBT President. “That will allow our Archives team to more efficiently process collections, provide better protection and security, and offer more accessibility to materials for research.”
The grant is among 31 made this year by the NRHS through its Railway Heritage Grants program, awarding a total of $150,000.
The EBT Archives and Special Collections is a joint undertaking of the Friends of the East Broad Top, Inc. and the EBT Foundation, Inc. The nonprofit Friends group now has 2,161 members worldwide. Its members have contributed tens of thousands of hours of labor and hundreds of thousands of dollars toward preserving the EBT over the past 23 years.
The EBT Archives received its first NRHS grant in 2022 for the purchase of a wideformat scanner. Since then, over 1000 maps, drawings, and oversize documents have been digitized using the scanner with many images now available on the public access digital catalog: https://ebtarchives.catalogaccess.com/
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