Joseph T. Richards (1845-1933) was a career civil engineer with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company who participated in several of their large construction projects in the first decade of the twentieth century. The records consist of the contents of a small portfolio of documents relating to the construction of Pennsylvania Station and its associated yards and terminals.

The Pennsylvania Railroad Company was the largest railroad in the United States in terms of corporate assets and tratffic from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the decline of the northeast's and midwest's dominance of manufacturing. This small collection consists of six schematic diagrams of racks and signals placed in service or removed from service, mostly in connection with the step-by-step construction of the Philadelphia Improvements of 1927 to 1952.