Looking for information on how pre-SEPTA lines were built

Hi,

I'm looking for primary source material on the planning, building, and operation of rail/trolley lines before SETPA (ie PTC, PRR, Reading). I'm not looking for books about the history of these lines, those are easy enough to find I think. I am looking for documents written by, for, or about these organizations back in the day. Stuff like: plans(completed or not), debates on how to construct the system, why they built the respetive lines the way they did, operations guides.

Does anyone know where info like this would be archived? Or is it all lost since the switch over to SEPTA.


Thanks,

flynnt wrote:I'm looking for primary source material on the planning, building, and operation of rail/trolley lines before SEPTA (ie PTC, PRR, Reading).

Don't know about PTC, but I think your best source for such information on the railroads would be the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical and Historical Society http://www.prrths.com and the Reading Company Technical and Historical Society http://www.readingrailroad.org.

This may not be as focused as Matt's suggestion, but you might also check with the Free Library as well as some of the major university libraries.

Years ago I was wandering around the Villanova library and stumbled onto a shelf that had all sorts of Phila. transit info from the 1910-1925 period. There were a lot of engineering plans plus what today would probably be called feasibility studies.

Unfortunately I couldn't tell you where those documents are now, but at least it means that people did archive them.

JeffK wrote:This may not be as focused as Matt's suggestion, but you might also check with the Free Library as well as some of the major university libraries.

You're right Jeff, that there are some surprises out there in the university libraries. You can probably find out from the T&H societies which libraries have what papers.

There's lots of great stuff at Temple's library in their transporation section. Also in the Free Library archieves (Main Branch) you can see articles and photos of sutff being built (like the BSS), although its a little harder to access those materials (they make you wear gloves when handling documents, etc)

The Urban Archives at Temple University has the Evening Bulliten's rapid tranist collection, which consists of 5 boxs of all kinds of stuff, from feasibility studies to memos. It is a lot of fun to look through. I made copies of quite a bit of the stuff I think I scanned the most important (at least for what I was doing at the time). Of course the last time I looked through it they couldn't find box 5 which is the one I really wanted.

Sean@Temple

With regard to the PTC, information on the construction of the Market Street Subway-Elavated would be wherever the archives of the PTC-PRT have wound up. With regard to the Frankford Elevated, the BSS and its spurs, archives of the City of Philadelphia would have these. The streetcar lines will be more difficult, as most of them were built by the separate companies which were merged into the Union Traction Co., later the PRT & finally the PTC. With regard to the Red Arrow Lines, the original edition of the Ronald DeGraw book "The Red Arrow" ( which contains information on the P&W as well) is probably the best source. This will be mostly history, but it might point you to more technical information. ( The City sources should also contain information on a 1913 Rapid Transit proposal, most of which was never built.)