October 1947 Official Guide to Railways
At some date in the 1970s, I borrowed this Guide from the desk drawer of an abandoned railroad agent’s office, I believe somewhere along the Baltimore & Ohio lines. Why a book of this vintage had been kept on hand is lost to history, but I was happy to obtain the resource at the time. The circulation directions for the book on the cover indicate that it was first placed on the passenger train “Shenandoan Limited” and then passed to various B & O stations as new guides were issued. I stored the book in a protective box and have referred to it numerous times over the years. Now over seventy years old, the book’s pages are quite frail. As I have consulted it recently, and pages have torn and split, I realized I would soon have a pile of brown paper “saw dust” instead of a book. From this conclusion was born the project to scan the Guide and post it on the website. After some consideration, it seemed most appropriate to place these links in the general passenger section of the site, since the primary focus of this guide was to assist passenger ticket offices across the nation. New May 2025: Guides are now in a separate section.
The October 1947 Guide was over 1500 pages, and it included entries for air lines and steamship companies. Several of the air lines still exist today under the same corporate names, although they surely are very different companies from those of 1947. Similarly, only a handful of the railroad companies in 1947 have the same name today. If there is a “fallen flag” from that era that interests any viewer, it can be found in this guide. While this particular year probably does not represent the largest number of passenger schedules and other information from the railroad companies, it is representative of the post-World War Two era before the railroad companies started to abandon the passenger service market. New May 2025: A link to these files can be copied if desired.
To keep the file sizes reasonable, there are around 100 pages in each of the fifteen files. The General Index is found in the first section. The indexes of points served (by water, rail, and air lines) are found in the final sections starting on page 1253 and continuing to the end of the volume. Pages 905 and 906 from the 1947 guide are missing, perhaps damaged at some point and thrown away. Page 905 dealt with the Pullman Company, and page 906 was the map for the important Southern Pacific subsidiary, the St. Louis Southwestern (SSW or Cotton Belt). I found the appropriate pages from the March 1945 guide and slipped them in for the missing pages.
PP 1 - 105 PP 499 - 598 PP 1001 - 1097
PP 106 - 205 PP 599-700 PP 1098 - 1200
PP 206 - 305 PP 701 - 787 PP 1201 - 1300