The Santa Fe Railroad Collection consists of materials dealing with the administration and operation of the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad Company from 1897 to 1968. Much of the collection deals with the legal aspects of the Company's operation including relationships with other railroads, corporations, the states and the federal government. The collection also contains information pertaining to company mergers, litigation, and laws as well as information on subjects such as the depression, segregation, the New Deal and World War II as they involved railroad management.
The types of material include company correspondence (which constitutes the bulk of the collection), legal documents, legal briefs, company and governmental reports, government documents and some correspondence from private individuals. A few charts and blueprints are also included.
The collection's arrangement follows as closely as possible the original system of folder subject headings. Because the folders are arranged in neither alphabetical nor chronological order, the container list is an indispensable guide to locating material in the collection. The container list provides an accurate description of the subject as well as its precise location in the collection.
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Sante Fe Railroad Collection. Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.
Due to the size of the electronic file, the online version of this guide is divided into 7 parts:
While editing the EAD version of the finding aid, it became very clear to the editor that different parts of the collection were processed by different people, some of whom used different rules for processing the material. While this was not a problem for most of the collection, the material in boxes 231-313 proved to contain some difficulties.
The two main series in the collection, the Legal Files and the Operational Files, consist of files that were numbered by Santa Fe Railroad staff. Throughout most of the collection, processors placed material from one file into one folder (unless a large amount of material required files to be split into multiple folders). Thus, for example, Legal File #2297 was placed into box 223, folder 5; Legal File #2298 was placed in box 223, folder 6; Legal File #2299 was placed into box 223, folder 7; and so forth.
This was not the case for material contained in boxes 231-313. Here, multiple files were often placed within a single folder. For example, material from six different files (Legal Files #2829, #2830, #2831, #2832, #2833, and #2834) were all placed into box 243, folder 2.
The editor decided that both for the sake of consistency and the well-being of the material (the possibility of refiling items with material pertaining to a different topic was deemed to be high), the files should be placed into separate folders. The folders were not given new numeric numbers, however. Instead, a combination of a numeric and alphabetic designation was assigned to each folder. Thus, the above mentioned folder 2 from box 243 was split into the following folders: File #2829 went to folder 2A, #2830 went to folder 2B, #2831 to 2C, #2832 to 2D, #2833 to 2E, and #2834 to 2F. Staff decided that such a numbering system would be make it less difficult for researchers to find material, in the event they searched for items that had been referenced differently in a published work.