Antique 1910 Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad Foreman Time Book 🚂 Work Log

What Did a P&LE Railroad Foreman Record? 🚂 P&LE Foreman's Time Book, Form 743 M. W., New York Central Lines

Size: 9" x 5"

This is such a neat item and I can't even photograph all the pages of it to show you. This is an antique railroad foreman's time book, printed around 1910, the little ledger a track foreman carried to keep his gang's hours and pay. The buff cover reads THE PITTSBURGH & LAKE ERIE RAILROAD COMPANY and TIME BOOK in bold type, with the New York Central Lines oval at the left and blanks for the division, sub-division, gang, foreman, headquarters and month.

📋 What's Printed in It

• The railroad's name, with the NEW YORK CENTRAL LINES oval
• TIME BOOK, with blanks for Division, Sub-Division No., Name or Number of Gang, Foreman, Headquarters and Month
• FORM 743 M. W., SIZE 5" X 8¾", 7TH REVISION, "ACTION OF N. Y. C. LINES M. W. COMMITTEE DEC. 8, 190-" (upper corner of the cover)
• INSTRUCTIONS, six numbered rules for the foreman
• DAILY RECORD OF TIME, with columns for name, check number, occupation and every day of the month, Sundays marked
• Totals, rate, amount and deductions, then DISTRIBUTION OF LABOR pages for the kind of work and where it was done

M. W. stands for Maintenance of Way, the track gangs who kept the rails, ties and roadbed in shape. The instructions are all business: the foreman had to enter time and the distribution of work every day, show time only for labor actually done under his own eye, spell every name right, give a full first name, mark "Paid by Certificate" when a man was paid that way, and make sure the hours on the distribution pages matched the time pages exactly. It's a real window on how a railroad kept track of every hour of work.

Such an amazing piece of American railroad history frozen in time that besides the ones I photographed you will be the first to open it and explore.

🛤️ The Little Giant

The P&LE was formed on May 11, 1875, when William McCreery and ten others filed their articles in Pennsylvania, and its main line opened in 1879 from Pittsburgh to Youngstown, Ohio, with branches to Beaver Falls, New Castle and Connellsville. Funny thing, for a railroad with Lake Erie in its name, it didn't actually reach the lake until 1914, at Ashtabula.

They called it the Little Giant, and it earned the name. With only about a tenth of one percent of the country's railroad miles, it hauled around one percent of the nation's tonnage, coal, coke, iron ore, limestone and steel, because it ran right through Pittsburgh's steel country. Vanderbilt's New York Central system bought in back in 1880 and took control in 1887, which is why the New York Central Lines oval is on this cover, but the P&LE stayed its own company right on through the Penn Central years. Its headquarters and station at the Smithfield Street Bridge in Pittsburgh is Station Square today, and when the steel mills closed, the Little Giant's run as an independent line ended in 1992, when CSX bought it.

🏡 Display

It's a wonderful piece for a railroad collector, anybody from Pittsburgh, Beaver County or the Mahoning Valley, or a family whose grandfather worked on the P&LE, and it looks great open on a shelf or in a display case.