Waybills, Part 117: more on the history

I have been writing about waybills, both prototype and model, for a decade or more, and the Part number in today’s title conveys that span of interest. In this post, I will take up a minor but (to me) interesting aspect of the appearance of the standard waybill. 

A background point that seems to surface from time to time is the question of when a truly “standard” waybill form emerged in use. Certainly as early as the formation of the AAR (Association of American Railroads) from its predecessor the ARA (American Railway Association) in 1934, there has been a standard form, slowly changing in minor ways over the following decades. 

And it’s equally true that a few decades earlier, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was no standard, and individual railroads’ paperwork  varied considerably. What happened in between?

The AAR was formed from the ARA in 1934, as stated, but also folded into it at that time was the  Railway Accounting Officers’ Association, previously an independent group. That group, the RAOA, had promulgated the waybill forms prior to the formation of the AAR. But until recently, I really didn’t know much about the RAOA.

I have previously, in this series of posts, often referred to the roughly annual volumes issued by the AAR Accounting Division (the successor to the RAOA), entitled Railway Accounting Rules. It was included among a variety of resources I recommended for background on model waybills (see, for example: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/02/waybills-18-resources.html ). 

Recently I came across an interesting document, a reprint of the RAOA Interline Accounting Rules book for 1922. It was scanned from and reprinted by the Cornell University Library. I bought a copy on Amazon (if you Google “Railway Accounting Rules,” it will come up, along with AAR volumes at least as late as 1985, and dating back into the 1930s).

This is a softbound book, 6 x 9 inches in size, containing a 74-page report that for the first time, spelled out mandatory rules for interline accounting, possibly including waybill forms as newly mandatory. In a forward to the document, the RAOA stated that, in the past, voluntary conformance to RAOA standards by railroads has largely been successful, but that it was time to make the rules mandatory.

The 1922 date of this document is in agreement with suggestions I’ve seen, that during the time the federal government took over direction of railroads, due to the traffic emergencies during World War I, in the form of the USRA (United States Railroad Administration), that a standard form was introduced. That form then continued after the dissolution of the USRA in March 1920.

Among the interesting discoveries in this document is the appearance of several mandatory forms of waybills, including the standard freight waybill, entitled “R.A.O.A. Standard Form 98.” Many years later, the AAR version of this form was still Form 98. And most of the information called for in this form, and its location on the form, exactly match forms 30 and 40 years later

The overall appearance of this form is certainly much like later ones, but the proportions of many of the blocks to be filled in are quite different. And I was surprised to find no perishable waybill form in this book. Evidently in 1922, procedures were in use that adapted the regular freight waybill Form 98 for use with perishables.

Incidentally, in a previous post about waybills, I showed several early 1920s bills from the Coudersport & Port Allegany Railroad (at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/08/waybills-part-116-early-prototype.html ). Noticeable on some of them was this legend in the upper right corner, just as we’d expect:

For comparison with the above waybill, below is the Form 98 from the AAR’s 1951 Railway Accounting Rules book. If you click on the form to enlarge it, you will see that in many places, dimensions are provided so that users can correctly print their own forms. But of course these dimensions were not included in printed forms.

It is also of interest to examine what waybill form may have been in use prior to 1920. I have not seen any prototype waybills from the 1900–1920 period, but have found a “sample” form, from the Freight Traffic Red Book of 1920, in its Appendix, which is shown below. This is fairly different from the RAOA Form 98, above, and the extent to which it may have been used is not known to me.

Note though that the central division between shipper and consignee information is here, as is the description of cargo at the bottom, car weighing information at right center, and car identification at the top. The identification of the company preparing the waybill, at top left, is odd in that it isn’t a preprinted name, perhaps aimed at infrequent shippers.

To go any deeper into the history of these forms might require examination of the Annual Reports of the RAOA from the ‘teens and twenties, which I don’t feel terribly motivated to do. Maybe the knowledge we have will have to rest right here.

Tony Thompson