Railway reports, acts, timetables and engineering books

In January 1832 a New York paper set out to tell Americans about a new way of moving goods and people, and promised its readers a history of railroads from their first introduction into England. In October 1839 George Bradshaw was selling the first of his railway timetables from Brown Street, Manchester, at sixpence. By 1871 Baldwin of Philadelphia was printing a catalogue of its engines, illustrated with photographs. All three are here, page for page.

The Railway History Archive holds 5,285 railway books and papers published between 1803 and 1929, and between them they name 644 railway and railroad companies. They are the papers the railways were built on: the reports the directors put before their stockholders each year, the acts that brought the companies into being, the engineers’ surveys and treatises, the timetables and rule books, the weekly railway press, and the pamphlets written for and against a line.

They are full of the detail a later history leaves out. A directors’ report gives the number of passengers carried and the money taken for hauling wheat and flour. An act names the curve where the new line is to leave the old one. A timetable charges sixpence for a dog. Read together they show the railways the way their builders saw them, line by line and year by year.

Each PDF is the whole book or paper. Single books are priced by length, from $7.99 for up to 120 pages to $24.99 for more than a thousand. A year of the American Railroad Journal in one PDF is $49.99.