B&M Form 559-A Report of Local Ticket Sales, Monthly Summary

I am doing some graduate research on passenger ridership on the B&M between Boston and Portland (and potentially MEC ridership as well) ... I have managed to narrow down the data source I'm looking for as "Form 559-A" which the B&MRRHS has one copy of from Seabrook, NH for an unspecified month in 1942. If anyone has old copies of these forms for either the Eastern Route or the Western Route (prefer "Western Route") for any period I would really appreciate the opportunity to obtain a digital scan of the document.

The purpose of the research is to attempt to make a per capita comparison of passenger train utilization today vs. passenger train utilization in the "legacy" era for the towns and cities along the route with a strong focus on those in Maine. Any data or information regarding ridership from late 1960 to 1965 is especially valuable because the route was identical to the Downeaster from 2001-2012 in terms of track routing and also in terms of the route terminus (Boston North Station to Portland).

If anyone knows the B&M form number for actual passenger ridership on trains that would be even better as local ticket sales probably don't capture every rider on a train (!).

Another possible form is Form 1440 "Passenger Car Record" but it is not clear exactly what would be recorded in that form.

Have you contacted the Boston & Maine RR Historical Society? Some of their archived B&M paper is accessible on line ( http://www.bmrrhs.org/on-lines-archives/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ) and there's a lot more paper on file at UMass Lowell that has yet to be digitized. Perhaps they have something that will help you.

TomNelligan wrote:Have you contacted the Boston & Maine RR Historical Society? Some of their archived B&M paper is accessible on line ( http://www.bmrrhs.org/on-lines-archives/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ) and there's a lot more paper on file at UMass Lowell that has yet to be digitized. Perhaps they have something that will help you.

I have been in touch with them and am working on some items of interest in their catalog (which is where this post was based on). The problem is very interesting in some respects, plenty of low level documents (individual train sheets, conductors logs etc.) and plenty of high level documents (annual ICC reports). The individual train sheets, conductor's logs or even monthly station reports, don't yield sufficient data for analysis and the high level reports are aggregated company wide which washes out data on the "Portland Division".