FAQ
| Questions and Answers About This Site | |
|---|---|
| Is this an official railroad site? | No, the Erie Railroad no longer exists, having merged in 1960 with the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western to form the Erie-Lackawanna. This site was created and is maintained by a fan of the Erie. |
| Do you have access to official railroad personnel files? | No, and to my knowledge those files for the Erie do not exist in a comprehensive collection, although some do exist in archives or private collections. The majority of information presented here has been gathered from other sources, chiefly the Erie Railroad Employee Magazine and railroad personnel rosters. |
| What other sources of information are included? | Transcriptions from various Federal Censuses, private advertising rosters, ICC Railroad Accident data, company phone directories, newspaper obituaries, etc. |
| Are Delaware, Lackawanna & Western employees included on your site? | No, although some ex-DL&W employees may have made it in to the indexes from the 1961-1962 issues of Erie-Lackawanna Magazine (predecessor roads were not always clearly marked). For persons researching the Lackawanna, the National Park Service's Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, PA is in the process of building an extensive database of DL&W employees, based on its archival collection of over 400 boxes of DL&W, Erie and EL papers. Steamtown's Historian/Archivist estimates that they will have a listing of around 30,000 employees when finished, with each listing based on personnel folders or other documents in the collection. The employee listing is a work in process, and is dependent on the availability of volunteers: that said, people researching D&LW employees are encouraged to email their queries to the Archivist at Steamtown. |
| What is the oldest information currently available on the site? | The oldest collection of information currently listed is the Chicago & Erie personnel record summaries which date back to the early 1880s. These are closely followed by the1899 locomotive engineer listing, which includes employees who were active from the start of the Erie through the 1930s. Other employees active in the earliest days may be listed in the master index if they were mentioned in Erie Magazine. |
| I'm looking for one name. Where do I start? | Unfortunately, you will need to slog through the various index tables. Start with the Erie Magazine Last Name Index. This is as close to a master index of Erie Magazine as exists, and contains the names and positions of thousands of employees. It also contains a listing of photographs if they were published in the magazine. If you find someone whose photo was published and there is no hotlink in the master index, check the separate On-Line Photo index to see if the image has been posted. Eventually, those photos will be linked to the master index. If you have a location where the person you are researching lived, check the location or Division-specific rosters. If you are researching an engineer who worked between the 1860s and the 1930s, check the 1899 Engineer Listing. |
| Which issues of Erie Railroad Magazine are included in the comprehensive index? | Click here to see the current list of magazines that have been indexed. |
| What criteria were used in developing the Erie Railroad Magazine comprehensive index? | Generally, mentions of employees that included name, city or division, and occupation were included. Some exceptions to that rule were where a major life experience (birth, death, marriage) was listed. Trivial mentions have mostly been omitted. |
| I can't find someone who I know worked for the Erie. | Please don't be offended, but this is a work in progress. There is a tremendous amount of information that still needs to be sorted through, and this is a one-man operation. |
| I found the person I was searching for - how do I get more information? | I try to put everything I have on-line for ease of use. However, that does not extend to material taken from the Erie Magazine, due to the large amount of information contained therein. If you find a reference in the Erie Magazine index, send me an email and I will be happy to pull the magazine issue (if it is in my collection) and scan or summarize the information for you. If it isn't in my collection, I'll try to refer you to a likely source. (When writing, please put "Erie Railroad" in your email message topic to facilitate your message getting to me). |
| Do you have a site-wide index? | No, my host, Rootsweb/Ancestry.com, does not permit on-site search engines. Many of the individual pages, however, have been written to facilitate web indexing - try using your favorite Internet search engine to search for a name first. |
| Do you benefit from the advertising on the site? | NO, it's a trade-off for the free web space for this site. Pop-up ads drive me crazy, too, and utility programs are pretty freely available to block them. |
| How often is the site updated? | Updates are ongoing, so check back every now and then. The date of the most recent major update (that is, updates to the Erie Magazine index files) is displayed toward the top of the home page. Thanks to the generosity of the Salamanca, NY Railroad Museum, I have been given access to the earliest issues of Erie and am now working my way forward from 1905. I have been updating the master index one year (12 issues) at a time, which generally takes anywhere between two to four months per magazine year to accomplish. |
