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Development of an Historical GIS of Railroads in the North-East USA 1826-1900
Richard Healey and Michael Johns,
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth, UK
Slides (pdf)
This project was originally conceived in the mid-1990’s as an outgrowth of research on the anthracite mining industry of Pennsylvania, where both mining and transportation interests were prominently represented. Initial work was focused on the industrial states of Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, at a time when GIS software tools were rudimentary by present day standards, scanned historical maps were a rarity and on-line bibliographical sources were virtually unknown. Of more recent years, in the context firstly, of funded research on the migration of heavy industrial workers in the 19th century and secondly, of visualization of railroad development, as part of the JISC/NEH ‘Digging into Data’ Challenge (in collaboration with the University of Nebraska, Lincoln), the project has moved forward substantially, taking advantage of all the developments in both software technology and on-line resources that have taken place over the last decade. The geographical coverage of the project has also expanded to cover Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia, with a planned extension into New England.
This paper begins with a brief examination of the wide range of on-line and off-line bibliographic and cartographic sources that are utilized in the project. Aspects of the design and implementation of the data capture, management and analysis system are then addressed, outlining both the GIS and database components. The GIS is obviously concerned with the location of the railroad lines, while the database holds the organizational chronology of railroad companies, including takeover, mergers and leasing activity. Linkages between the GIS and database components are crucial for tracing the highly complex relationships between the evolving organizational structure of the railroad industry and the changing pattern of ownership of specific track segments on the ground.
The final section of the paper explores current research uses of the railroad GIS, with particular reference to several of the major ‘Eastern Trunk Lines’, such as the Baltimore and Ohio RR, the Erie Railway and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Future potential applications in relation to broader work on regional industrial development will also be considered, as time permits.