I recently had my 1908 RR map of PA scanned. It was published by the Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs. With a size of 3'x5' it was quite an undertaking and we had to run my 102 year old map through the scanner a dozen times to get it right. Now, I want to make it available to friends who might be interested in it. I think it is a delightful map and you will find it even includes your favorite Pennsylvania narrow gauge lines. The tiff file is almost 400 megs and almost unusable but a friend found a compression/viewing tool called DjVu which brings it down to 9 megs without compromising too much quality. It's a fun map to check out. The zoom is pretty good and the measuring tool measures out the 6 inch to the mile scale pretty well. If you check it out and find any problems or bugs I would like some feedback.

You need to download a small plug-in here:

http://www.caminova.net/en/downloads/download.aspx?id=1

After you have the plug-in you should be able to view the map.

https://docs.google.com/uc?id=0B6r-wY29 ... load&hl=en

The first time you use it you might have to tell your computer to associate the file with the plug-in.

Thanks Tom !!!!
Great reference tool for finding old right of ways.
Thanks again for making this map public. Who scanned the map for you?

Mike Tillger

For the record, there were quite a few of these maps published by the Commonwealth over the years, almost a precursor to annual-ish highway maps issued by state Departments of Transportation in recent years (and viewed by many prognosticators as an endangered species in the future, between electronic navigation and GPS).

As I recall (and have, stashed somewhere), Pennsylvania issued maps like this from maybe 1885 through 1920 or so, and I've also seen ones that depict "electric railways" or traction lines.

Would the "professional" archivists around here (Messrs. Bell and Baer, among others) care to chime in with more definitive information as to the years of publication of these things?

Incidentally, some states--Penna. and Md., among them--STILL publish, or have published of late, official state railroad maps, though the modern ones I've seen fold up like highway maps and lack the rich detail of these big Pa. maps.

And BTW, Tom, you missed your opportunity. You were supposed to save the file, burn CDs of this map, and offer them on eBay as an "exclusive, rare, one-of-a-kind" collectible for $49.95............ it seems that folks fall for such compilations of public-domain material all the time.

Mike,

I have a good friend who is a university digital collections specialist did the scan and I simply helped with the scan. The scanner rolls the map through and will scan something of any length. I might be able to help if you have some prints you want scanned.

Sandy,

I hope that nobody tries to copy and sell my map. That is another reason for using the DjVu software for compression and viewing. I've seen the guy hawking the HABS/HAER photos on ebay many times.

The 400 meg tiff is really cool if you have a computer with the horsepower to look at it, but all in all it's not 200 times better than the 9 meg file I've make available.

Thank you, and your friend, for going to the trouble to put this online. I agree about the "rare collectible" CDs--if they're burned to CD, they aren't rare, and if you have to call something "collectible", it isn't.

One of the commercial mapping companies has a large collection of very old USGS maps they've digitized and made available for free--I think it was just called Historic Railroad Maps. For the life of me I can't remember the URL and it isn't bookmarked on this laptop.

That would be my employer, MyTopo:
http://historical.mytopo.com

We host the site, which was created by a rail historian, was initially hosted by UNH. We took it over when it outgrew their server space and area of interest. It has not been expanded in a while, since no one else has taken up the charge of acquiring and scanning the maps.

And, for the record, I can attest that by our analysis, there is no money to be made selling digital copies of Historic Maps.

Becky,

Was it this site:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/rrhtml/rrhome.html

Well, THERE you are! (and now I have you bookmarked.) Nothing wrong with the LOC site, but I have spent some happy times finding some old detail on the maps in that collection.

Tom,

I would like to sincerely thank you for making this map available. I was given what I believe was a 1910 version of this by my grandfather when I was about 8 years old and it hung in my "playroom" till I went off to college. At that time my mother ripped it down from the wall as she thought I outgrew the "train thing" and turned the room into her sewing room. I loved that map and studied it almost every day. I was really upset with her when I returned from college during my first break in classes to find it gone along with a 1960 PRR wall calendar she also took off the wall and threw out because it was "several years out of date"! Thanks again for brightening my day.

Sincerely,

Charlie

I have the 1897 version of this map, which is similar except that across the top of my map, each railroad shown on the map is listed alphabetically, along with its particular color. While these maps are fascinating documents, there are some errors. Tom's map, for example, shows a line in Columbia County that was abandoned in 1869!!