Journals and magazines

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The railway press, week by week

The first number of the American Rail-Road Journal came out in New York on January 2, 1832, under a picture of an engine drawing a coach along the rails. D. K. Minor of 35 Wall Street promised a weekly paper of sixteen large octavo pages, three columns to the page, published on Saturdays at three dollars a year, payable in advance. Anyone who found eight subscribers and sent the money had a copy free. Part of it would give “a history of the first introduction of railroads into England”, and the front page of the first number begins that history with an extract from Nicholas Wood’s treatise on rail-roads and the coal works round Newcastle upon Tyne.

The site holds the Journal from 1832 to 1870, sold an issue at a time, and most of those years can also be bought whole as one PDF. A year of the American Railroad Journal in one PDF is $49.99.

Beside it are the papers that followed. Herapath’s Railway Journal, published in London, is here from 1835, and the Railroad Record of Cincinnati from 1853 to 1872. There are issues of the Railroad Gazette from 1870 and 1885, volumes of the Street Railway Journal from New York between 1884 and 1905, and the monthly journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, printed at Rochester.