And now a more serious question...

I am interested in learning about how the railroads utilized early data processing technology. They were fairly large users of punch cards, unit record equipment and early mainframe computers.

Do any of the museums or rail history groups have any info on just how the railroads processed their data? Having old flowcharts and processing descriptions would be great, but even just having some examples of used railroad punch cards would be helpful.

I am thinking that setting a sample railroad problem (yard classification?) using punch cards might be a cool thing to get one of the computer museums to do.

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Will

You are right about the early usage. When I went to work for the Pennsylvania in 1962 car movement records were already being generated by computer. However, railroads and computers were very much like railroads and steam engines in that the "not invented here" syndrome was rampant. This lasted into the 1990's. Each railroad felt its system was superior to the others. I was as guilty as the rest when I worked with the AN's computer guru, later Chief Accounting Officer, setting up computerized operations in the early 1980's.

With all the mergers and the adoption of uniform data standards by the AAR, I highly doubt the programming for any of these legacy systems remains.