Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 12 shown for “Photograph of Pullman-built Railway Post Office and baggage car” — 20 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-31 23:21 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.The Metropolitan Museum of Art: HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Photograph of Pullman-built Railway Post Office and baggage car
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1920

Photograph of Pullman-built Railway Post Office car
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1916

Photograph of Pullman-built Railway Post Office car
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1885

Baltimore & Ohio railway mail car model
Artist not stated in the record · 1949-1956

Photograph of postcard of wreck of the Delaware and Hudson train
Artist not stated in the record · September 4, 1908

Mail sack
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1890-1910

Photograph of wreck of the Southern Railway train
Artist not stated in the record · August 15, 1930

Atlantic & Pacific Railroad Owney tag
Artist not stated in the record · 1888-1897

Photograph of Railway Post Office clerk in mail car
Artist not stated in the record · 1913

Photograph of mail streetcar in Boston, Massachusetts
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1900

Photograph of Owney and Railway Post Office clerks
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1895

Photograph of Railway Mail Service clerks in Kansas City, Missouri
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1910
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 20 matched · 20 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.12 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-31 23:21 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.