Railroad Blueprint Archive
An archive of blueprints for historical railroad equipment
Latest updates
Currently under construction!
This site is brand new, so is fairly incomplete as of yet. Please check back soon, as I am actively building it as of June 2026. But this is something I've wanted to do for about 20 years now, so I don't expect this site to go stale any time soon. In fact, I just bought a new scanner so I can scan quicker and in higher resolution.
- Kyle
About
Purpose
The purpose of this website is to be able to post and organize blueprints and technical data for historical railroad equipment. Most of it comes from a private collection.
The purpose of the private collection is to preserve, as best as possible, all of this information for the future. The originals are kept in climate-controlled, acid-free, waterproof (and mostly also fireproof) archival storage - far better conditions than they ever were at the railroads, and I have tried to scan these at the best possible resolution so they are also preserved digitally.
The original high-resolution images are not available to the public at this time.
Information wants to be free!
Tell that to the people I have to buy the originals from! These things can get terribly expensive. Until such time as I can find a way to support this collection through purely passive means or people start giving them to me for free, I have to limit this a bit so I have an income stream to continue the mission of preserving as many blueprints as I can get my hands on. I'd be happy to scan and publish them for free if I didn't have to pay for them, so if you have physical paper blueprints you want to send me, I'd be happy to scan them and publish them here for free download.
That said, if you are part of a museum operation and are trying to restore one of these pieces of equipment, please contact me, and I would love to do what I can to get you a copy for free or close to it.
(Oh, and information hates when you anthropomorphize it.)
Why cyanotype blueprints are awesome
The old process to make blueprints with the blue backgrounds and white lines is called "cyanotype", and they are truly awesome. As old as they are, the paper has become somewhat fragile, but they are largely waterproof because the original development process called for leaving them out in the sun and then rinsing away the undeveloped parts with water. In my experience, they are also largely UV-proof - when left exposed to UV, the blue background fades, but then when they're brought back in a dark area it comes right back. I have seen this in person when I was working on preserving a blueprint near a window on a sunny day and had a sunbeam hit it for a while before I noticed, and sure enough it came right back. Diazo prints are generally a little less blurry and still historically significant, but cyanotype blueprints are by far my favorite.
How to contribute
If you have blueprints you'd like to contribute to the site, condititions for accepting them are as follows:
- If you have an electronic copy, it has to be from a source which allows redistribution. Get in touch so I can clear them for distribution rights and I'll see if I can get them posted.
- If you have physical paper blueprints you'd like to contribute and you want to send them my way, I'd be happy to scan and publish them. Get in touch and we'll see what we can put together.
For any community contributions, as long as I don't have to pay for them, I don't feel the need to charge for them, so I'd just as soon make the original full resolution scans available for free download.
Sincerely,
Kyle
Curator of the Railroad Blueprint Archive