JimBoylan wrote:gokeefe wrote:Interesting to wonder if the Official Guide ever paid royalties to the railroads. Can't imagine they did.
When I worked for the railroads starting in 1975, the listings were Paid Ads! The station indexes were free editorial content. Since not all roads paid to put their complete schedules in the book, the station index included a footnote something like "on the road indicated, but not listed in any schedule."
Correct--the railroads paid by the page to be in the Guide. That's why there is virtually no white space in any of the Guides; the railroads filled up every page, even to the extent of printing explanations of reference marks sideways and sticking random reference marks wherever they would fit (even in the unused part of a column of an entirely unrelated train) rather than spring for the cost of another page. You also find sections underneath a timetable, in paragraph form, headed "Additional trains"; it saved having to start a new page for trains that would otherwise have taken only a small part of a column. In more lavish days, railroads like the New Haven, New York Central, and Pennsylvania devoted pages to detailed commuter schedules (the New Haven and B&M even put them in their System timetables); as austerity set in they cut back, and Penn Central published only stations and mileages for each line, with a recommendation to consult individual timetable folders. A number of Western roads never did (at least in memory) publish commuter schedules in the Guide, notable examples being the C&NW, CB&Q, and IC (I believe the SP published their San Francisco "commute" services to the end).
I had occasion to visit the Official Guide offices numerous times in the 1970's; it was a classic letterpress printing operation, essentially unchanged since the 19th century. Typesetters picked individual pieces of type out of a rack (upper case above and lower case below) and placed them individually into a frame, from which a casting would then be made. The frames were preserved as is so that any change for next month could be made just by taking out (say) a 5 and replacing it with a 7 to accommodate a 2-minute change in a train time. Later they changed to (I believe) offset. At the height of passenger service in the U. S. each monthly issue could easily run to 1200 pages; the frames for each page had to be stored until it was time to do the next month's issue (the deadline was the 20th of the preceding month).