N&W Valuation Maps Now Available for Downloading

[NW Mailing List]

A good friend, whose business involves land and the records associated
therewith, contacted me today and informs that NARA (the National Archives
and Records Administration) is now scanning the railroad Valuation Maps and
putting them on-line, downloadable, free.

INDEX OF ALL RAILROADS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE:

https://catalog.archives.gov/search-within/562366

INDEX OF N&W VAL MAPS AVAILABLE:

https://catalog.archives.gov/search-within/1501567

These were the Valuation maps as submitted to the Bureau of Valuation of
the Interstate Commerce Commission, and are dated 1916.  (The Valuation Act
was one of the greatest boondoggles ever foisted on the taxpayers, and its
reporting and bookkeeping requirement continued into the 1960s.)  I have
seen correction dates as late as 1923 on some of the sheets.  And it is
very convenient that the sheets themselves carry the "Real Estate Record,"
i.e. the dates of parcel acquisition, grantor and grantee, and deed book
location of the documents of conveyance.  That is, you do not need a
separate Real Estate Index Book to determine land acquisition particulars.

These are not wimpy little scan files.  The ones I have checked range in
size from 17 megs to 28 megs each.  The original map documents measure
about 56" wide and about 25" high.  If you download an image, it comes to
you in JPG format at a pixel resolution of 300 ppi, which is excellent.
Due to the file sizes, this is not a job for a cell phoneess... you will
need a real computer to deal with the files.

The "Radford District" maps (83 sheets) begin at Vinton and go west to
Giles County and covers part of the Bristol Line.  The branch lines are
covered, too.  Scale is generally 1 inch  = 400 feet.  The maps are marked
with numerous revision notes made with yellow and red pencil.  I do not
know if all Val maps for the entire N&W system are yet scanned and
on-line.  Some segments of original Right-of-Way bypassed with line
relocations are shown and identified.

As with almost old map and document scans put up on host websites, the
files are exactly as scanned, without any correction or enhancement at
all.  So the images in the scan files are pretty desaturated and muddy, but
readable.  They are easily enhanceable for color, contrast, brightness,
etc,  in almost any graphics program, even one of the free image correcting
programs.

The one disorienting factor is that the maps were drawn "upside down,"
i.e. North is towards the bottom... just like the current Norfolk Southern
track charts *resulting in the necessity to read them from right to left !
If anyone figures out why this was done, please let me know.

I am attaching a sample taken from Section 10, Sheet 9.  This image is only
a small part of the much larger map showing Roanoke Junction (later called
Randolph Street,) the Roanoke depot, and Hotel Roanoke.  The image has had
minimal Photoshopping (about three edits,) just to show you what can be
coaxed out of these files.

For my own Druthers, I wish the mapping had been done twenty years earlier,
before the railroad became a well-engineered, double track heavy-duty
pipeline.  But, then, I am only a grumpy old curmudgeon.

Happy Map Diggin' !

-- abram burnett
 Turnip Activist, Blogger and Content Creator
.
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