Jervis Langdon, Jr. (1905-2004) was a railroad executive largely known for rehabilitating ailing railroads and for his influence in the reshaping of national railroad policy in the 1970s. Langdon's papers document the U.S. railroad industry's efforts to obtain a competitive rate rule through Congress in relation to other freight carriers, such as trucks and barges. Also included is material covering Langdon's efforts in revitalizing bankrupt railroads, such as the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific, and the Penn Central reorganization and its subsequent 1980 valuation case.

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. This item is a scrapbook kept by a railroad station agent(s) somewhere near or south of Philadelphia between 1887 and 1888. The purpose of the volume was to enable the agent to make out waybills for freight by containing updated information as to the rates to be charged on various specific goods, the division of rates with other companies for interline movements, and any embargoes or restrictions on routings. The volume offers a snapshot of the types of traffic, mostly iron and steel, livestock and agricultural products, most common to this territory and of the various through routings common at this time.