About This Site

In late 2005, the webmaster was conducting some research on historic rail accidents, and was using the Department of Transportation Library’s Online Digital Special Collections. Although the DOT resource is a good one, he found that the site was sometimes not available (one time for more than two weeks), and that the text transcriptions of the accident reports were sometimes not very accurate – in some cases, entire lines were missing. In addition, some entire reports are indirectly accessible as PDF files, but no transcription can be found.

This site is intended to serve as an enhanced version of the DOT library, with more accurate transcriptions. The transcriptions are enhanced with paragraph numbers and editorial footnotes. In addition, the accident reports are provided with summaries and other data, including a cross-reference of railroad names and personal names mentioned in the reports.

This is an ongoing project. In order to assure accuracy in the transcriptions, they are being manually created and compared against the PDF files. This is, of course, a time-consuming process. Summaries are also prepared. All of the information is loaded into a database, allowing a variety of different listings and searches. At the time that the site was launched, the reports from 1911, 1912 and a portion of 1913 were available. Further reports will be posted on a regular basis. The person and railroad indexes only cover reports that are available on this site.

Note on copyright: Works of the United States Government (defined in 17 USC 101 as “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties”) are not protected by copyright (17 USC 105). Therefore, the original reports (and, by extension, the PDF scans and the transcriptions of the same), are in the public domain. Other material contained on this site, including the summaries, editorial insertions, footnotes, person index and railroad index, are protected under copyright law. The author has chosen to issue a non-exclusive, permanent license to anyone wishing to use this information for academic or non-profit purposes, provided that a proper acknowledgement of the source is given. All other rights to the copyrighted material on this site are reserved.