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  • General discussion about locomotives, rolling stock, and equipment
General discussion about locomotives, rolling stock, and equipment

Moderator: John_Perkowski

 #1517237  by Rick A
 
While doing research for the Ashton Valve company I have used many articles and adverts from old trade journals. Here are a few that relate specifically to Railroads.
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 #1517238  by Rick A
 
and a few more.
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 #1517239  by Rick A
 
And ........
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 #1517452  by Rick A
 
There were also other journals the company advertised in. here are a few...
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 #1517455  by ExCon90
 
The Official Railway Equipment Guide appears to be the predecessor of the Official Railway Equipment Register, which had the status of a tariff and was an official source of information on railway equipment approved for interchange between carriers. It listed every freight car owned by each railroad, showing car number, dimensions, and other detailed information about capacity and any specific features; any listed car had to be accepted in interchange by any railroad to which it was offered if inspection showed it to be in good order. Its present-day counterpart is the Uniform (or Universal?) Machine Language Equipment Register (UMLER) maintained by the AAR. Issued monthly, it is an invaluable source of information about freight cars at any given time. At least in later years, It also listed every interchange point in the U. S., shown in each railroad's individual listing.

The Travelers' Official Guide, issued monthly, was the predecessor of the Official Guide of the Railways and showed all passenger schedules of U. S., Canadian, and Mexican and Central American railroads, and some interurbans, and was considered the authoritative source of schedule information. Each railroad furnished the publisher with its schedules by the twentieth of the preceding month, and railroads paid by the page to be in it. In the 1930's and -40's, airlines paid to be listed because that was where travel agents looked for information at that time.

If any of those publications have been digitized in a searchable form they will be invaluable sources of historical information.
 #1517482  by Rick A
 
Do you have copies of any of these old periodicals?
Thanks for the information. It amazes me to find how many of these old periodicals have been scanned. I've also purchased printed copies of a couple of old catalogs.'On demand", printed right in Harvard Square , Cambridge and at a reasonable price.
 #1517576  by ExCon90
 
I have some Official Guides from the 20th century, and a few reprints from 1868, 1869, and 1875. Various issues were reprinted over time by the original publisher* and may be available somewhere on the net. I believe the New York Public Library has a complete set going back to the earliest days. The National Railway Historical Society has a fairly representative assortment, including some from prior to November 1883, when the railroads adopted the four Standard Time Zones; prior to that each railroad decided what city's sun time would be its standard, and their schedules make for interesting reading. However, the NRHS collection was transferred to the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where it is available for public use, but the DeGolyer is not in a position to do research on request, as the NRHS used to do.

* After the Guide largely lost its usefulness after Amtrak the publisher sold out to another company which still publishes a monthly freight-service guide, but I discovered on inquiry that they have absolutely zero interest in historical preservation and have nothing left of the original Guides.

Finding any Equipment Registers would be a catch-as-catch-can situation; the NRHS collection has a dozen or so over a period of several decades, but they are about 9x12" in size, an inch or more thick, and came out twelve times a year, constituting a serious space problem, and railfans in general have not been interested in collecting them. They're very useful if you're looking for a specific answer about something, but they don't provide the recreational reading and browsing afforded by the Official Guides and generally were not collected and saved as the Guides were.

If somebody on here knows of a source anywhere on the net capable of being searched, I'd certainly like to hear about it.
 #1519274  by Rick A
 
A few more journals.
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 #1519275  by Rick A
 
There were a lot of them.
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 #1519513  by Rick A
 
All of these can be viewed online in their entirety.
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 #1519514  by Rick A
 
A few more.
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