About Me

   I've been a Civil War buff since I was a Junior High School student in the late '50's. I was the youngest member of the Central Texas Civil War Roundtable for several years.
   I became interested in the logistics of warfare when, as a new Ensign in the Navy, I served aboard an oiler off Viet Nam. Without our fuel, passengers, mail, food, and spare parts, the destroyers and carriers would have spent considerably less time on station.
   Almost the entire remainder of my 20+ year career was spent supporting Marines in amphibious warfare. My specialty was never the fighting, but always the logistic support.
   In the late '90's, I read Black's Railroads of the Confederacy. I began to wonder what impact different logistic decisions would have made for the Confederacy. After much thought, I decided that I did not have enough information on any area of logistics support (mines, foundries, railroads, blockade running, horses, salt, wagons, manpower, etc.) to make any reasonable decisions. I decided to investigate several of these areas in detail -- starting with the railroads (the address for the web site is www.csa-RAILROADS.com. I had intended to do a csa-FOUNDRIES.com, a csa-MINES.com, etc.).
   Black, and others, make statements without giving the facts to support them -- the statements may be correct, but I could not decide without seeing the evidence for myself. For example, the Confederate railroads were short of locomotives -- how many did they have? How many did they capture and manufacture? How many did they need? I began to hunt for the necessary numbers in various libraries.
   Once I began to collect the information, I needed a way to tie it together. Spreadsheets or a database were not the answers, so I tried a web site. The easy linking to full pages of data made it work. And if I put the data on a web site, I might as well make it available and useful for anyone else interested enough to find the site.
   My wife goes crazy every time I make a list of things to do on vacation or over the weekend, but I hope you will find my obsession for facts and lists to be interesting and useful. I also decided to transcribe all the period Confederate railroad documents (company, government and newspaper) that I could find -- I could see connections between documents that I could not find mentioned in published works. If I publish the documents (found scattered in dozens of places), maybe others will see useful connections and increase our understanding of the Confederate side of the war.
   Fortunately, I live in North Carolina -- situated more or less in the middle of the documents I need (Selma, Atlanta, Savannah, Tallahassee, Columbia, Raleigh, Richmond, Charlottesville, Washington, D. C.). But I'm always looking for assistance from anyone who knows of data or documents that I have not posted.

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