https://fallen-flags-wiki.fandom.com/wiki/Fallen_Flags_Wiki
Im trying to document all of the defunct north american railroads. Please help out.
http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/
When you start checking the ‘heritage’ of today’s Class 1’s and the fallen flags they absorbed, don’t forget the each of those fallen flag absorbed hundreds of other fallen flags to get to the Class 1’s that existed in the 1950’s.
By “defunct” do you mean jsut the roads that no longer exist in any form, or are you including, as Balt mentioned, all railroads that were built and later operated under new names as well as those which are entirely extinct?
There have been books written on this subject, and the Official Guide used to publish a special section from time to time showing some of the old former names.
A number of years ago I stumbled across some documents that detailed the corporate histories of all the railroad companies that went into forming both the Chessie and Seaboard sides of CSX. There were several hundred corporate railroad names that were involved in creating each of the properties and who got swallowed up by who.
Some of the ‘big’ carriers would form other companies to carry out specific improvements - the B&O created the Baltimore Belt Railroad to build the Howard Street Tunnel and the tracks between Camden Station and Bayview where it connected with the Royal Blue Line between the Canton Ferry Terminal and Philadelphia - before the completion of the Belt Line, trains - both passenger and freight, were ferried across Baltimore Harbor between Locust Point and Canton.
I can recall reading about the ‘Boat Train’ that operated between Boston and New York with several ferry crossings during the trip. Subsequently a all rail route was completed.
As I recall, the Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company has good coverage of many of the ‘leased’ lines that came to form the system.
ICC General Orders 20 and 26
ICC Valuation Dockets (Canada and Mexico are a different story)
You may wish to modify your task. There were so very many that my guess would be several thousand.
I have a copy of the Santa Fe compliance (ICC Reports; Valuation Docket 625; Volume 127) which lists all of Santa Fe’s predecessors, most of which were created by Santa Fe itself for a variety of reasons. It is comprised of 847 pages.
There have been several organizational charts published that showed that type of information. Trains has done them in the magazine, although those were limited to a two page spread, so some information may have been “lost.”
The New York Central, f’rinstance was famously assembled by Erastus Corning from no fewer than ten separate railroads. And that was just at the beginning.
Then you have things like the Utica and Black River, which was taken over by the Rome, Watertown and Ogdensburg, which was then taken over by the Central.
It’s a tangled web that will, as mentioned, include thousands of corporate names.
DC - That is GO-26 from the valuation order. Also comes in a “family tree” chart for most railroads unless they are really small.
OP might want to consider finding a law library that has all the valuation dockets and bound volumes of the ICC. You can already see some of it on wikicrapedia and the labelled models websites. Neither did a good job of translating. (The wikipedia copying of several valuation dockets was really shoddy and in one case tried to schlep-in some political horsecrap about federal grant R/W…Most of the Wikipedia dockets are truncated)
Just ones that no longer exist in any form and paper railroads.
Paper railroads by themselves are a sizable list, even today. My favorite example is the two paper railroads involved with South Shore’s main line between Kensington and the Illinois-Indiana state line, and that’s only about 7 route-miles. Penn Central’s corporate structure was incredibly complex and involved an amazing number of paper railroads, see any Moody’s Transportation Manual prior to 1976. Wabash was a paper railroad from 1964 to about 1994 or so, being leased by N&W before finally being absorbed. Also consider legal requirements such as the now-stricken state constitutional requirement that railroads operating in Texas had be be incorporated in Texas. There are lots of others.
…and then there’s the difference between a “paper railroad” under a corporate umbrella and an independent that never got off the ground. Colorado is full of both types of non-extant railroads. Out west, BLM has filing maps for railroads and routes that never happened. Several were attempts to break up perceived monopolies, political ploys and related nonsense. Many were doomed efforts.