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Looking For Railroad Valuation Surveying Manual Circa 1913
Anybody that has surveyed along old railroads knows that the lasting legacy from the Valuation Act of 1913, which produced our nation’s Val Sheets, has proven to be incredibly helpful on so many occasions. They also stand as a testament to the surveyors’ exceptional skill used more than a century ago when locating those concrete markers that have survived throughout all of those years.
Does anybody by any chance happen to know if there was a survey manual prepared in connection with these valuation surveys?
books.google searches net things like below, but I was just wondering if maybe there was a manual issued specifically for the valuation surveying?
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5 Replies
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I looked through the material from a railroad surveying seminar by Charlie Tucker, which I attended several years ago. He lists a couple of items that seem to relate to your question–
–ICC General Order #1 (1914) – mapping instructions
–ICC General Order #4 (1915) – field survey parties
This seems to indicate that they did issue some survey instructions, but not in the form of a manual. No doubt these General Orders are in the National Archives. I don’t know of any other place they might be found. Perhaps someone else knows more.
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Thanks for the tip. Very much appreciated.
Next stop: https://www.archives.gov/research/transportation/railroad-valuation
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A couple of updates for anybody reading.
1) The National Archives Records Administration (NARA) has Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) records in Record Group 134; however, presently RG 134 has only 0.001% of its records digitized.
archives.gov/research/transportation/railroad-valuation
2) books.google ended up being where I spent most this week searching and while the attached PDF does not drill down into the minutia I was hoping to find in regards to the survey methods and procedures followed by ICC’s “road and track field crews”, it does include the original first Valuation Order and some of the subsequent modifications and supplemental orders.
N.B. The name given for the PDF; i.e., ICC Valuation Order with Supplemental Orders – Google Books, was renamed from the generic name assigned to it by Google and was downloaded from:
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