Welcome to the New York Railroad Archive. This is a web site I have set up to share information that I have collected, and am still discovering, about the history of the railroads in New York State. The site is organized around three main themes:
Railroads
These are pages dedicated to many of the railroads that operated in Western New York until the late 1960s. These pages include information about the history of the railroad, photos, copies of employee and public timetables, historic documents, and other items.
Places
These are pages about the towns and cities served by the railroads of New York. There is information about the town, railroad operations in the area, and photos and other information.
Clippings
I have a collection of scans of newspaper and magazine articles about the railroads of New York State. They are linked to different railroads and places so it is easy to find related material.
A Bit of History
I first started a web site around 1995 as a place where I could share the various maps, photos, and other railroad-related information I had collected. The original site was hosted by the kind folks at railfan.net as wnyrails.railfan.net. In 2007 tye site moved to its own domain, wnyrails.org.
In 2008, John Stewart, who had founded www.railroad.net in 1996, took over the reins of the site. In 2011, the site entered another new era and became a project of the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum. In September 2013 the site moved to a new domain, wnyrails.net. By 2015, twenty years after it started, the site went dark. Until now.
Today
In 2024, I was able to find some of the old content on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org) but it wasn’t possible to easily and quickly pull those pages in WordPress and I am having to rebuild the site by hand. This will take time, but gives me a chance to collect and add new information.
This is very much a work in progress. I am definitely not a graphic designer and am playing with the format of the site to find the look that I like best and seems easiest to read, which means not all the page formats are consistent. As time goes on you will see more pages, more digital artifacts, and more information.
I really welcome any feedback or additional ideas, information, or photos. Please send me any thoughts at the email address below.
–Mark Fischer