Railroad Line Maps Indexing Project

We undertook this large project for the Union Pacific Railroad Corp back in the mid-1990s. At that time, the Union Pacific had acquired vast amounts of information through its merger with the Southern Pacific system. Among that information were thousands upon thousands of railroad line maps.

Over a period of about two years, we indexed over 13,000 maps, all of which had been scanned and stored on CDs. Our task was to populate Lotus and Excel spreadsheets with information that described every section of land that a railroad right-of-way crossed on every alignment map.

Each map was 60" long, and dated from the present back several decades. Depending on the terrain, and interesction with other lines, rights-of-way on each map crossed five to ten square-mile sections of land, each of which was recorded.

The information we recorded is, of course, propriatary. It amounted to an estimated 114,000 lines of data. Each line of information recorded state, county, station, railway, valuation segment, township, range, section, map number, scanned image name, and filing location. Ultimately, this information was destined for a larger database.