I bought a pile of "Railway Mechanical and Electrical Engineer" magazines at a local yard sale....they are from the 1950's. Fascinating reading with a huge collection of articles on field shop visits, how-to articles, some remnant steam engine articles, and lot's of cool ads.

In 30 years of collecting railroad technical books and documents....this is the first I've ever seen this. It says founded in 1832 as American Rail Road Journal. How long did they publish? Is a complete set archived somewhere? Does anyone have any they want to sell?

The American Railroad Journal was the preeminent US railroad trade publication in the 19th century. Its early offices were at 25 Wall Street in New York City, which shows how closely tied railroads were to banking and finance even from the very start. In the 1860s it was edited by none other than Henry Poor (of Poor's Manual of Railroads and Standard & Poor's fame), and then in the 1880s by Matthias Forney. Forney shifted the emphasis of the magazine away from general railroad construction and finance and toward a focus on mechanical engineering, which led to several name changes in subsequent years (American Engineer & Railroad Journal, etc.).

I don't know where you might find a complete set, but the early decades at least appear to be well represented in major university libraries. Of course the changing titles can make it difficult to see the continuity in the publication, especially in this age of Google.

My understanding is that it was eventually merged into Railway Age, so in a certain sense it's still in publication.

-Philip Marshall

This Wikipedia article has the history of titles... looks like it eventually was combined with Railway Age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Age

Any good engineering university library should have bound volumes. I was able to copy a bunch of stuff of interest to me years ago at the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, which is NOT particularly known as an engineering school. They also had bound volumes of Railway Review until that publication folded around WWI.

On edit:

Earlier editions (pre-1923) may have been scanned and available on-line; post 1923 are still under copyright. Here is a link to the 1923 volume:

https://archive.org/stream/railwaymecha ... 5/mode/2up

The best way to answer questions of this type is to do a WorldCat search (http://www.worldcat.org). For example: searching for "Railway Mechanical Engineer" in their home page search box found a complete set archived at the Northwestern University Transportation Center Library (which happens to be closest to where I live - your results may vary based on your computer's location).