I am fascinated by the history of railroads in the Texas Panhandle. There are very good books and articles in railroad periodicals about our railroad history, but they don’t tell the whole story. An historical society or museum has a great opportunity to preserve the more nitty-gritty details of local railroad history. The railroad “paper” that is at the top of my list are timebooks. These contain records of day-to-day activities of engineers, firemen, brakeman, and conductors. Those kept by the first three are typically records of the date a person worked, the train they worked on, when they started and ended a run, and sometimes personal records such as hours on duty or short personal note about their run; such as mechanical problems, accidents, and other incidents. Conductors’ timebook, also called wheel reports, are more detailed. They list the cars in the train, their load, origin and destination and weight. A snapshot of a specific train on a specific run, truly railroad gold!
Over time I have been fortunate to find several timebooks from railroad employees. I scan the timebooks, and eventually transcribe the information into Excel spreadsheets. It’s a fun job. The only drawback can be the penmanship of the employee. Some have beautiful, readable entries, some are difficult to decipher. I am no handwriting analyst, but even difficult penmanship can be figured out to an extent.
OK, so this is an interest of mine. How does this relate to our members? I think there are a lot of timebooks out there, but their value is overlooked. As I understand we have around 500 recipients of our newsletter. I am sure many were, are or related to railroad employees. Perhaps your grandfather was a brakeman on the Santa Fe or a conductor on the Fort Worth and Denver. I’d love to see this information preserved.
If you have timebooks and are willing to lend them to the SFHRM for scanning we’d greatly appreciate it. There are other items related to timebooks, records the railroad kept, that are interesting too. If you have any railroad paper, Santa Fe, Ft. Worth and Denver, Burlington, Burlington Northern, Rock Island, or BNSF we’d love to look at it. The best contact would be through the SFHRM website: Contact Us – Amarillo Depot
Of course any loaned material will be well-treated and returned in good shape. I will also send members who loan materials the scanned results as jpg images or PDF files.
That’s it for now. Jerry Michels
Scans of timebooks from the 1960s and 1970, courtesy Bill Stevens
