R&LHS turns 100
It’s the granddaddy of all U.S. rail-history organizations
Among railroad history and preservation organizations, most groups are relative newcomers. Many of the large crop of railroad-specific clubs got their start in the 1960s and ’70s as much-beloved regional roads were merged or abandoned.
The B&O Railroad Museum is one of the better known institutions, having been formed by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad itself in 1953. The Seashore Trolley Museum opened in 1939. Largest of the national groups, the National Railway Historical Society originated in 1935. Both the New York and Massachusetts chapters of the Railroad Enthusiasts date to 1934.
But the elder statesman is the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society, which this year celebrates the centennial of its 1921 founding. R&LHS claims to be the oldest rail-history organization in North America and one of the oldest anywhere dedicated to the history of technology.
Never placing among the larger groups, R&LHS counts a membership of about 2,200, drawn from railroad management, academia, the museum and library worlds, and history-minded railfans. Its 10 regional chapters are but a fraction of the dozens fielded by the NRHS, but chapters are just one element of the whole.
R&LHS’s first priority is Railroad History, a semi-annual journal that began in 1921 as a modest pamphlet known simply as The Bulletin. Over the years, it has been guided by such personages as professor H. Roger Grant; historical consultant Peter A. Hansen; writer Mark Reutter; and John H. White Jr., retired curator of transportation at the Smithsonian.
It was White who, upon becoming editor in 1972, rebranded the journal as Railroad History to reflect its mission more accurately. It has grown from a 6x9inch, 16-page publication to a full-color 128-page production.
Over the years, R&LHS’s leadership has drawn from a spectrum of historians, railroaders, academics, and preservationists. Among the previous presidents are professor (and acclaimed photographer) J. Parker Lamb and B&O/CSX railroader Bill Howes; the current president is Robert Holzweiss, who in his day job serves as deputy director of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum in Texas.
For its first 50 years, R&LHS and its journal were overseen by founder Charles E. Fisher (1889–1972), a New Englander who is alternately remembered as either aloof and coldly efficient, or friendly and cooperative, freely sharing information and photographs. His sometimes heavyhanded methods drove away some people, who then formed rival groups.
In its early years, the organization collected thousands of railroad artifacts and displayed them at Harvard University’s Baker Library in Cambridge, Mass.
When the group lost that space in 1981, much of the collection was relocated to Cape Cod’s Edaville Railroad, which then declared bankruptcy in 1992.
This brought a moment of reckoning, when the R&LHS board decided that it didn’t possess the staff, skills, facilities, or finances to maintain a museum. The large hardware in the collection was auctioned off, while photos, lithographs, prints, records, and books were consolidated at the California State Railroad Museum
in Sacramento. R&LHS’s Pacific Coast Chapter had been the cornerstone in the founding of CSRM, with its collection of locomotives and cars becoming the core of the museum’s roster.
Along the way, some R&LHS chapters actively operated fan-trip excursions. Among the most notable events was a 1937 Open House at the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Altoona (Pa.) Shops. The New York and Chicago chapters took the lead in running two chartered trains from New York/Philadelphia and one from Chicago. With the freight railroads’ exit from the passenger business at the coming of Amtrak in 1971, excursions became harder to arrange, and that activity declined to almost nothing.
It’s hard to imagine what Fisher would think of today’s R&LHS, which is chiefly known for three achievements. First, its national body continues to publish Railroad History, which surveys the railroad scene in historical, cultural, and technical context. The group also provides annual awards for books, articles, photography, videos, and lifetime achievement. It also offers research grants for historians, and last year began a scholarship program for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in rail history and engineering.
Second, as noted, the Pacific Coast Chapter was more than instrumental in the creation of California’s world-class railroad museum, one of just four such state-owned facilities in the United States.
And third, as of 2019, another chapter helped bring railroad history to life for a whole new generation of Americans.
R&LHS’s Southern California Chapter maintains its own public display of equipment, called RailGiants Museum, near
Los Angeles. One of its prized pieces was Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 Big Boy 4014, which UP had donated in 1962. The Big Boy class represents by many measures the largest and most powerful type of steam locomotive ever built. Of the 25 constructed between 1941 and ’44, seven survive as museum pieces. The eighth is the 4014, which the chapter agreed to trade back to UP, which had deemed it to be the best candidate for a return to operating condition in its heritage steam fleet.
UP reacquired the engine in 2013 and restored it over several years, steaming it up to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the driving of the Golden Spike — marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad — in May 2019. Later that year it toured UP territory, being seen by more than 1 million people throughout the Midwest and West; another tour is set for August-September 2021. Thus, thanks to an R&LHS chapter, an exciting episode of living history has been written anew.
And what of the future? Steam programs tend to be tenuous, and even museums can come and go. But given the odds, R&LHS’s Railroad History and its other programs are likely to be around for some time to come.
DAN CUPPER, a retired Norfolk Southern locomotive engineer and author of scores of articles in Trains and Classic Trains, is editor of Railroad History.