As is often the case with mysteries, I stumbled into this one quite by accident. A few years ago, Sam needed to thin out his rolling stock, and he sold me a pair of undecorated Atlas Trainmasters, and the decoders to go into them, at a very good price. I stuck them in a shoebox, unsure of what to do with them. They’re the Phase 1A variation with the big Mars light in the short hood, which doesn’t match the Trainmasters owned by the Lackawanna or the Pennsy. They are correct for the Wabash (outside my geographic territory), the Southern Pacific (even farther) or Fairbanks-Morse demonstrators (outside my era, even if decals were available, which they aren’t.) I finally pulled them out a few weeks ago, got the decoders in, and ran them for an hour at a library show. Nice engines.

By every measure, they’d be a good addition to my show roster, but they’re going to need paint first. So what to paint them? A freelance scheme of some kind, perhaps? How about a riff on the so-called “McGinnis” paint schemes of the New Haven and the Boston and Maine? That’d be cool.

Now, if you’ve spent much time immersed in railroad history, you’ve heard of Patrick McGinnis, particularly in association with the New Haven. He took control of the railroad in the Fifties, and brought in designer Herbert Matter to give it a new look. For a very long time, it was McGinnis (or his wife) who was given credit for the bold red/black/white paint jobs on New Haven locomotives. He slashed the New Haven’s spending on just about everything except graphic design, then swooped off to the Boston and Maine Railroad to do the same thing there. He was arrested, tried and convicted for fraud, and served federal time for it. By most accounts, he left both railroads, which were already struggling, worse off than they were before. These days, his name seems to float pretty high on the list of 20th-century railroad-executive villains.

During a recent weekend recovering from a medical procedure, I spent some idle time browsing Wikipedia for background on the railroad-related aspects of his career. For years, I’ve used Wikipedia for things like this, and I’ve found it to be a generally reliable source of basic information. If anything, Wikipedia tends to err to too much detail about a given topic, which I don’t regard as a fault. When seeking starter research on someone or something historical, I’ve almost never hit Wikipedia and come up empty.

But here’s the thing: Patrick McGinnis is not there. He’s briefly mentioned on the New Haven’s page, but there’s no link. He’s not mentioned at all on the Boston and Maine page, even though he committed fraud while running that railroad. The Patrick McGinnis disambiguation page (yes, really!) mentions three other men, unrelated to him. There is a German-language page for him, but no English-language counterpart. Other noteworthy railroad executives of his era, like Alfred E. Perlman, W. Graham Claytor Jr., and John W. Barriger III, have Wikipedia pages with good career summaries.

Here’s a guy that easily passes Wikipedia’s threshold of notability, but is nearly non-existent to it. What’s going on? Yes, I know that Wikipedia depends on a massive legion of volunteers to write, edit and fact-check those billions and billions of pages, but still. Has nobody ever stepped forward to make a page for him?