After lunch Dick and I visited the Soda House at the Hagley. This building houses the museum's collection of manuscripts and archives. There is a lot of historical information here for those interested in railroads, particularly for those interested in either the Pennsylvania Railroad or the Reading Railroad. While most modelers focus on pictorial collections, there is a lot of additional information that can be found amongst the manuscripts and archives. We'll take a look at a few examples to give you an idea of the breadth of information that is available.
If you visit the Soda House you can look at the finding aids for either railroad contained in a number of binders. Even before you visit you can do some upfront work by simply going to the Hagley library's online catalog and doing some searches. As I mentioned in my previous blog the most successful search is done by first casting a wide net and then narrowing the search down.
To start, one can open up the online catalog and click on Manuscripts and Archives in the Quick Limit search just like we had clicked on Photographs, Prints and Moving Images when we were searching the pictorial collection. Then type in Pennsylvania Railroad for your keyword search and click on search. As you might expect the hits are numerous, roughly 10,000. Fortunately they are ordered according to relevance so to look at major collections you probably will need to scroll through the first hundred or less. You will notice there are a lot of corporate records which represents the business aspects of the railroad. If you are curious about what is contained in any of these either click on the display number or the title.
This will take you to a page that will explain more precisely what the files contain. Listed will be the author, in this case the Pennsylvania Railroad, the dates covered by the material, description of the material i.e. in one case there are 28 linear feet of files, how the files are organized and then two very important items, a history of the material and the scope and content of the material. These last two items are fairly detailed and will be helpful in deciding whether it is likely to have the information you are looking for.
Let's take a look at a few examples. For those people interested in engines you might try clicking on the records of the motive power department. This is a huge collection that contains information on types and numbers of rolling stock as well as information concerning the design and construction of various pieces of equipment. If you scroll through you will also see records from the office of the chief engineer for different regions of the Pennsylvania Railroad system. These often describe construction projects on the right of way.
For example the one from the Eastern Region contains documents describing the completion of 30th St. Station and the demolition of the old Broad Street Station. It is really worth perusing the various hits because more than likely you will find some items of interest. While a lot of the archival material concerns the business aspects of the railroad there is still a lot of material that would be useful to the modeler. Many times there are track diagrams, particularly when changes were being made to the right of way. Also there are detailed drawings, sometimes in the form of blueprints for stations and other railroad structures.
While the examples I have given so far concern the Pennsylvania Railroad there is also a lot of material from the Reading Company. When Dick and I visited the Soda House we looked through the two binders containing the finding aids. While the pleasure of going to the Hagley is finding something you were looking for, it's also the unexpected is also very rewarding. For us that day it was looking at the traffic density map for Fairhill Junction in Philadelphia one for day in 1941. The surprise was that a train was moving through on average once every 7 minutes. A busy railroad in wartime.
-Ron
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