Saturday, April 30, 2016

Southern New England Railway Maps

A few years ago at one of the CVRHS conventions (in Palmer, if I recall correctly) Jim Murphy displayed a series of original, color Southern New England plat maps. Jim (and another volunteer) were kind enough to hold them up and let me photograph the series of maps. I had them on my old computer back up hard drive and ran across them a couple of weeks ago. Thought it would fun to share them here. 
These are one of the few sets of originals we know about - and are more than 100 years old. 
Obviously there's some overlap between the photos of the maps - these things were big! 
















3 comments:

Chris Adams said...

What a treasure! I can totally understand why you'd want to model this "what if" line - especially since there's so much groundwork (in some cases, literally) done between these maps and the info in the "Titanic Railroad" book. Makes this just about the perfect "proto-freelance" line, for sure.

Matthieu Lachance said...

I once found in Quebec National Archives the original Hereford Railway plans from the late 1880s. It's a single sheet of over 90 feet long! It wasn't fun at all to roll it back in shape!

Joe said...

These are priceless! Thank you for sharing these. I grew up in Sturbridge, and never realized what the railbed was as a child. My friends and I use to play on the roadbed in the woods. I was quite surprised to learn of the SNE some 30 years later and have been obsessed with it ever since. I am planning/ designing a ho scale layout from palmer to southbridge and these prints help tremendously!