Finding Aids

The Central Railroad Company of New Jersey operated a main line between New York and Scranton with numerous branches within the state of New Jersey. It was one of the more important anthracite-carrying railroads, with important commuter and terminal facilities in the New York area. The collection primarily consists a set of incomplete minutes of parent, predecessor, and subsidiary companies.

Records collected by Christopher P. Wahmann during his career as a manager in the Operating Department of Amtrak between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, including Amtrak documents and those of other railroads and commuter agencies over which Amtrak operates or that operate trains over Amtrak's lines.

The Delaware and Bound Brook Railroad Company was incorporated in 1874, for the purpose of forming a second railroad route between the cities of New York and Philadelphia. Their records consist primarily of basic corporate documents such as minutes, account books, annual reports to the I.C.C., and agreements.

Frank A. Weer (1932-2019) was a white-collar railroad employee who spent most of his career with the Reading Company, and after the transfer of railroad operations in 1976, with Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail). This collection is a small portion of a much larger collection of official railroad company documents, maps and drawings. Documents are primarily those of the Reading Company, Pennsylvania Railroad Company, Penn Central Transportation Company and Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail).

Karl Gabosch (1932-2008) was an employee of Pennsylvania Railroad Company and its successors, Penn Central and Conrail. The collection consists of a sample of company manuals, internal publications, and maps that were issued to him over the course of his career.

The Pennsylvania Railroad Company was the largest railroad in the United States in terms of corporate assets and traffic from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the decline of the northeast's and midwest's dominance of manufacturing. These records provide nearly comprehensive coverage of corporate matters for the entire time span and reasonably complete coverage of the functional departments from 1920 to 1950, with less coverage from 1893 to 1920 and from 1950 to 1968.

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.

The Reading Company, chartered in 1871 as the Excelsior Enterprise Company, became the holding company for the system of railroads, canals and coal mines assembled by the predecessor Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company between 1833 and 1896. The Reading Company employment and real estate records comprise a largely incomplete and extremely fragmentary synthetic collection of material related to the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company and its successors. The collection comprises incomplete employment records largely dating from the first half of the twentieth century, records related to the employee pension program and the Relief Association, a small amount of contracts, and deeds and agreements reflecting the company's process of land acquisition following initial main line construction in the 1830s and through to the early twentieth century.

Chartered in 1869, the Wilmington & Western Rail Road Company formed to create a rail line connecting Wilmington, Delaware, with Landenberg, Pennsylvania. A non-profit organization, Historic Red Clay Valley, Inc. (HRCV)., formed in 1960 and today operates the line as a heritage railroad. The collection includes eight maps of the line created by the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1918 and two publications concerning the history of both the Wilmington & Western Railroad line and HRCV.