HomePRR Chronology

A Chronology of the Pennsylvania Railroad

Christopher T. Baer

PRRT&HS lost a wonderful friend and great contributor to our understanding of the history of the Pennsylvania Railroad when Christopher T. Baer left this world on June 11, 2025. He was a valued member of the Hagley Museum and Library from 1976 until his retirement in 2018, but his relationship with them did not end there, as they made him Curator Emeritus and provided office space that he used to perform additional research and aid other researchers as requested. This gave access to a huge amount of information about the Pennsylvania Railroad, which he was more than happy to share with PRRT&HS, providing information for articles and books written by others and writing a few himself. He was also PRRT&HS Historian from 2011 through 2022. Chris was instrumental in setting the stage for the Hagley to acquire a large portion of the Pennsylvania Railroad archives, which was a major turning point in their becoming known as a center for railroad history.

Sometime along the way, Chris began to record information from those archives and other sources about the Pennsy, which led to his publishing a yearly series named "PRR Histories". His growing interest in the PRR led him to begin to compile a chronology of events in the history of the railroad, to which he would add as he discovered new information. This grew to the point where in 2004 he gave the PRRT&HS a copy of the first edition of his "A GENERAL CHRONOLOGY OF THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD COMPANY ITS PREDECESSORS AND SUCCESSORS AND ITS HISTORICAL CONTEXT" for distribution to the public on the society's website. He would from time to time provide updates to the chronology, the one in 2015 having been significant. The Society has made the latest version of the chronology available online continuously since 2004.

He was working on another major update in 2024 when he became ill late in the year. Michael Burshtin, another member of PRRT&HS, stepped in to help Chris organize all the data and get it into a releasable form prior to Chris' death. What you see here is the product of that effort, and of the more than 30 years that Chris spent to discover and record these detailed glimpses into our railroad throughout its lifetime (and before and after), all 188 volumes, totaling 18,230 pages.

We are proud to offer this collection to you free of charge in two formats for downloading (and viewing, if your browser supports it):

Separate Files:

You can download (and view, if your browser supports it) each volume as a separate file. This provides it exactly as Chris provided it to PRRT&HS and is the better way to get the information if you already know the specific time period in which you are interested. At approximately 747 KB per file, you can significantly reduce the storage space required if you plan to download only a few files. Each of these links will take you to a page on which you will find the indicated volumes.

A Single ZIP file containing all the files

You can download the entire chronology as a zip file that contains all of the files of the chronology, along with a global index that we have created that will drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to search the entire collection for the information you seek. It also includes a README file that will help you learn how to use the chronology. This puts the entire chronology at your fingertips and provides the best way to find that information for which you are looking, at the cost of a large zip file that you will have to download and unzip, and that will take up 205 MB of disk space when you unzip it.

Download ZIP File of Entire Chronology.