Early Railroads

The Early Railroads CD, with 39 books, covers the history and technology of railroading, and also includes related fiction.

Intended for use with PCs (Windows or Linux) and recent Macs (OS X), our books are in plain-text format, not audio or video. You read them on your computer screen.

You can see the complete table of contents below. Please use the Find function in your browser (under Edit) to look for a specific author or book.

Table of Contents

History

• Danger Signals: remarkable, exciting and unique examples of the bravery, daring and stoicism in the midst of danger of train dispatchers and railroad engineers  by John Hill and Jasper Brady
• Daring and Suffering: a History of the Great Railroad Adventure by Lieutenant William Pittenger
• Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland, and Ireland by Joseph Tatlow, 1920
• Great Fortunes from Railroads (= volume 2 of The Great American Fortunes) by Gustavus Myers
• Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway by J. Randall
• The Letters of Franklin Lane, personal and political, edited by Anne Wintermute Lane and Louise Herrick Wall
• Old Rail Fence Corners: The A.B.C's. of Minnesota History
• The Railroad Builders, a chronicle of the welding of the states by John Moody, 1919
• Railways. Report of the Railway Department of the Baord of Trade on the London, Worcester, and wolverhampton and on the Birmingham and Shrewsbury Districts, 1845
• Report of the Knaresbrough Rail-Way Committee, 1819
• Rides on Railways by Samuel Sidney, 1851
• The Story of the Cambrian, a biography of a railway by C.P. Gasquoine, 1922
• The Story of the First Trans-continental Railroad by W.F. Bailey
• The Sunny side of Ireland, how to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway by John O'Mahony

Technology

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)

• New York Tunnel Extension
• Paper 1150
• Paper 1151 North River Division
• Paper 1152 East River
• Paper 1153
• Paper 1156 Terminal Station West
• Paper 1157 Site of the Terminal Station
• Paper 1158
• Paper 1159 East River Tunnels
• Paper 1168 Tests of Creosoted Timber
• Paper 1170 The Water Supply of the el Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, New Mexico by J.L. Campbell
• Paper 1172 Locomotive Performance on Grades of Various Lengths
• Paper 1177 Final Report of the Speical Committe on Rail Sections
• The New York Subway and Its Construction, 1904
• Practical Rules for the Management of a Locomotive Engine in the Station, on the Road, and in Cases of Accident by Charles Hutton Gregory
• The Traveling Engineers' Association: To Improve the Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads, Examination Questions and Answers for Firemen for Promotion and New Men for Employment, 1919

Fiction

• Cab and Caboose: The Story of a Railroad Boy by Kirk Munroe
• The Celestial Railroad by Nathaniel Hawthorne (short story)
• Empire Builders by Francis Lynde
• The Iron Horse by R.M. Ballantyne
• The Last Spike and Other Railroad Stories by Cy Warman
• Legend Land, being a collection of some of the old tales told in those western parts of Britain served by the Great Western Railway
• volume 1
• volume 2
• Dyke Darrel the Railraod Detectie or The Crime of the Midnight Express by Frank Pinkerton
• The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit
• Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive or Two Miles a Minute on the Rails by Victor Appleton