The Official Guide of the Railways

[Jim Martin]

This is just me showing off my new shiny thing, really; but I thought that some people would find it interesting. It's the July 1962 edition of the Official Guide of the Railways - a recent eBay purchase - which was kind of the US equivalent of Bradshaw's Guide or the National Rail Timetable, but with more stuff in it.

 

 

Although the 1960s are generally seen as a time of ever-deepening decline for passenger trains in North America, I've always found it a fascinating period. Some very grand trains were still running, while others were shells of their former selves: trains of a single locomotive and a couple of passenger cars were quite common, as were trains with a string of head-end cars and a single coach at the back. A really good book on the decline of passenger trains is Twilight of the Great Trains by Fred Frailey: I'd strongly suggest that you try to get the second edition, particularly if you're interested in the Illinois Central. 

 

As you'll notice from the cover, it's not only about trains, and the first timetable section covers airline schedules.

 

 

If you check the very bottom of the page, you'll see that flights are either by "Britannia Empress" (recalling the CPR's "Empress of..." steamship naming style) or "Douglas DC-8 Jet Empress": this was early enough in the Jet Age that those airlines which had them weren't shy about pointing it out.

 

After the airline schedules comes the meat of the book: the railroads. This is more than a passenger timetable: it lists the names,  and sometimes the contact details, of officials and agents in various cities; it includes some freight schedules (particularly for fast freight services); it includes many small railroads that had long since given up on passenger service:

 

 

Among the bigger roads, some were still making an effort:

 

 

And, of course, trains of this stature were also covered by the equipment guides which were a feature of American timetables, so that travellers could select the desired accommodation:

 

 

Of course, many branch and secondary routes were freight-only by this time, and there are plenty of pages like this one:

 

 

The book covers a fair chunk of Central America too: especially Mexico, which had connecting services and even a couple of through cars from the USA. I was surprised to find just how big Mexico is: check the mileage on the MoPac/National de Mexico Aztec Eagle and you'll see that the St Louis to Mexico City sleeper was a 3000-mile ride, 1300 of it south of the border, which is 800 miles further than Chicago to Los Angeles on the Super Chief.

 

 

And so it goes on. The whole book is 1200-odd pages long. There are some shipping line schedules (not that many, if truth be told), there's an interesting list of military bases throughout the USA and the nearest railroad stations to them, and there's a 228-page index of stations that runs from Abajo, New Mexico, on the Santa Fe, to the New York Central's Zylonite, Massachusetts (neither of those locations had passenger service: first and last among places that did were Abbeville, South Carolina, a stop for the Atlantic Coast Line's New York-Birmingham Silver Comet, and Zwolle, Louisiana, which the Kansas City Southern served with a nameless daily local in each direction between Shreveport, Louisiana and Port Arthur, Texas). It's a mighty book and a fascinating snapshot of the railroads at a time when passenger service was down, but not yet out.

[Johann Marsbar]

I started collecting US timetables back in 2000 whilst visiting the Galesburg Railroad Fair and have since built up quite a collection of the things, the number more than doubling in the last couple of years after I secured a collection formerly owned by a deceased friend from an uncertain future.

I've got 11 of those "Official Guides", the oldest by far dating from 1891, though the rest date from the 1934-1971 period and which progressively get thinner in page content as the years pass by as the various passenger operations stop running. The 1934 edition has over 1530 pages in it and still includes a numer of electric interurban lines that were operational at the time.

It's a bit of a specialist collecting field this side of the Atlantic but I have managed to pick up some "sensibly" priced examples in the UK, though the majority of the collection was bought on trips to the US.

[Jim Martin]

17 hours ago, Johann Marsbar said:

I started collecting US timetables back in 2000 whilst visiting the Galesburg Railroad Fair and have since built up quite a collection of the things, the number more than doubling in the last couple of years after I secured a collection formerly owned by a deceased friend from an uncertain future.

I've got 11 of those "Official Guides", the oldest by far dating from 1891, though the rest date from the 1934-1971 period and which progressively get thinner in page content as the years pass by as the various passenger operations stop running. The 1934 edition has over 1530 pages in it and still includes a numer of electric interurban lines that were operational at the time.

It's a bit of a specialist collecting field this side of the Atlantic but I have managed to pick up some "sensibly" priced examples in the UK, though the majority of the collection was bought on trips to the US.

 

I've been sort of looking out for an early 60s edition, so I jumped on this one (it was only £14, which I considered very reasonable for what you get). It's the only copy I own, and probably the only one I ever will, although if I saw an Official Register of Passenger Train Equipment from a similar date, I'd be quite tempted. I have a copy of the ORER too, but that's from the 1990s. 

 

The 1891 edition sounds interesting. I've seen those CD-based pdfs of older editions that you can buy, but how well do the originals last? They're printed on pretty cheap paper, aren't they? I was looking at an LNER-era (1928, I think) working timetable in the National Archive at Kew last summer and the pages were so fragile that you could barely touch them.

 

Jim

[Johann Marsbar]

1 hour ago, Jim Martin said:

 

I've been sort of looking out for an early 60s edition, so I jumped on this one (it was only £14, which I considered very reasonable for what you get). It's the only copy I own, and probably the only one I ever will, although if I saw an Official Register of Passenger Train Equipment from a similar date, I'd be quite tempted. I have a copy of the ORER too, but that's from the 1990s. 

 

The 1891 edition sounds interesting. I've seen those CD-based pdfs of older editions that you can buy, but how well do the originals last? They're printed on pretty cheap paper, aren't they? I was looking at an LNER-era (1928, I think) working timetable in the National Archive at Kew last summer and the pages were so fragile that you could barely touch them.

 

Jim

 

The 1891 had been sent away at some time in its life to be "dealt with" by a professional conservator by the look of it so you can actually look at it without it falling to bits!

 

I bought a 1934 one at a train fair in Baltimore, MD, back in 2012 which has pages that you have to treat very carefully and it's the only one I have which lives in a plastic bag to catch the disintegrating paper edges.  It only cost me $3.00, so you can't really complain!     All the others are OK, even the 1943 one which used wartime economy paper.

Southern Pacific used cheap paper for their timetables in the late 1940's and they can be very fragile as well so need watching if you see any for sale.

 

There were some Regional Guides produced in the early days by other publishers and I've picked up a couple of New England based ones from the 1890's fairly cheaply on UK e-bay (£3 from memory), whereas if you see them in the US you can double that and add a 0 to the end....

Will dig them out and put some images on here tomorrow.

 

 

[eldomtom2]

For comparison, here is Amtrak's 2018 timetable, the last full timetable I can find.

[30851]

On 27/03/2023 at 05:10, Jim Martin said:

 

I've been sort of looking out for an early 60s edition, so I jumped on this one (it was only £14, which I considered very reasonable for what you get). It's the only copy I own, and probably the only one I ever will, although if I saw an Official Register of Passenger Train Equipment from a similar date, I'd be quite tempted. I have a copy of the ORER too, but that's from the 1990s. 

 

The 1891 edition sounds interesting. I've seen those CD-based pdfs of older editions that you can buy, but how well do the originals last? They're printed on pretty cheap paper, aren't they? I was looking at an LNER-era (1928, I think) working timetable in the National Archive at Kew last summer and the pages were so fragile that you could barely touch them.

 

Jim

 

I have the March 63  Official Register of Passenger Train Equipment  - only such thing that I do have! Didn't know they existed when I found it for sale.

 

 

[Johann Marsbar]

This is the cover of the April 1891 edition.......

 

 

The internal pages follow the standard format.......

 

[Johann Marsbar]

The other ones I mentioned are the "Pathfinder Railway Guide" - Published in Boston and seemingly available in two versions.

The standard one is about the same page size as the ORG but is obviously a lot thinner as it generally deals with lines in the greater New England area, though this one does include through services and RR companies catering for long distance journeis down to Florida and also Transcontinental routes, including the likes of CP.......

 

 

Interior page layout tends to follow the ORG style format.......

 

 

The other version is the "Baby Pathfinder" which is actually smaller than A5 and designed to fit in a breast pocket of a jacket by the look of it...........

 

 

This deals purely with local New England roads (B&M, NH, B&A, MEC etc) and is in a much more condensed t/t format......

 

[Jim Martin]

15 hours ago, 30851 said:

 

I have the March 63  Official Register of Passenger Train Equipment  - only such thing that I do have! Didn't know they existed when I found it for sale.

 

 

Cool! Including the notorious automat cars, too!

[Jim Martin]

7 hours ago, Johann Marsbar said:

The other ones I mentioned are the "Pathfinder Railway Guide" - Published in Boston and seemingly available in two versions.

The standard one is about the same page size as the ORG but is obviously a lot thinner as it generally deals with lines in the greater New England area, though this one does include through services and RR companies catering for long distance journeis down to Florida and also Transcontinental routes, including the likes of CP.......

 

 

Interior page layout tends to follow the ORG style format.......

 

 

The other version is the "Baby Pathfinder" which is actually smaller than A5 and designed to fit in a breast pocket of a jacket by the look of it...........

 

 

This deals purely with local New England roads (B&M, NH, B&A, MEC etc) and is in a much more condensed t/t format......

 

I was going to post that the fact that other companies were printing competing editions suggested that the National Railway Publication Company used the word "official" in the same way that radio djs do: to mean "this is important because it's ours"; but then I saw the rider on the cover: "Resolution of the National General Ticket Agents' Association: that the Travelers' Official Railway Guide be considered the official organ of this Association".

[dave1905]

The ORG is handy to find what railroads served what stations and for passenger service.  Freight service is less well documented.