Waybills, Part 126: More routing books

Not long ago I posted a discussion about Routing Guides, as they were called, an official document (in multiple volumes) that every railroad maintained, back in the day. That discussion happened to center on one such book I had, A Nickel Plate guide of 1945. (To see that discussion, go to this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/11/waybills-part-125-routing.html .) In the present post, I want to go further.

I’ll begin with the Nickel Plate 1951 guide, issued on May 15 of that year. Its cover is shown below. As before, it is an 8.5 x 11-inch volume, this tine of 480 pages, 1-1/8-inches thick. The 1945 guide shown previously was 1008 pages and was 1-3/4 inches thick.  

What changed to make the size so much smaller? It still covers routes from the same six states as before, and to the same 11 destination states (including the District of Columbia) as before. Most of the interior pages look very much like the previous volume, so there is not an evident reduction in numbers of approved routes. Possibly some routes were moved to a different guide, as this one’s full title is Eastbound Routing Guide No. 1. We know there were several others. 

In some ways a more interesting example of such a guide is one for a smaller railroad, the Western Maryland. This happens to be West-Bound Routing Guide No. 10. Also an 8.5 x 11-inch volume, it comprises only 269 pages, only 9/16-inch thick.  

It includes routing from origins on not only the WM, but also the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad, via several roads, including the Pittsburgh & West Virginia. Basically, it is westbound routing to mid-America, specifically the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Oho, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin. 

This particular routing guide  differs in some ways from what I’ve shown for the Nickel Plate example. First, it contains multiple pages of “exceptions” to existing tariffs, nearly all on cement and related products. Below is page 19, one of several pages of such material. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.)

 The second exception is that stations are listed alphabetically in addition to numerically (the NKP Guide had them only by number). Below is an example of this kind of listing, from page 150 in the Guide. (My apologies for not getting the book quite flat for scanning.) 

The approved routes are listed by number, as was the case in the previous NKP guide, and I show a single example from this Western Maryland guide to illustrate. The lower portion of page 307 lists again some exceptions for Grain and Grain Products.

These kinds of routing guides were superseded from time to time, so that older ones were often discarded after a holding period. I am delighted to have the ones I’ve been able to use as illustrations, and I hope they cast some light on the prototype’s process of identifying approved routes.

Tony Thompson