The Southern Railway Historical Association archives contain many collections of photography, drawings, documents, books, and artifacts related to the Southern Railway and also to railroading in general.
The photography collections of the SRHA are vast and cover not only the Southern Railway and its predecessors, but nearly all US railroads, including short line and industrials. SRHA has tens of thousands of negatives, slides, and photo prints from the collections of Oscar Kimsey, Ben Roberts, Dale Roberts, Marvin Black, David Driscoll, Frank Greene, John Endler, Richard Prince, and the Southern Railway Public Relations Department, amongst several others.
The SRHA has collected over the years a large quantity of Southern Railway mechanical drawings from various shops across the system, primarily Hayne Shop, the principal car shop for the Railway. This gave SRHA a copy of nearly every Southern Railway freight and passenger car drawing. SRHA also has a variety of locomotive drawings and structural drawings. The drawings are in multiple forms including original linens, blueprint, mylar, vellum, microfilm, and aperture cards.
An extremely large quantity of original Southern Railway documents is housed in the archives. This includes the complete collection of Southern Railway Presidents' Files (think of it as nearly every piece of paper to come across the Southern Railway President's desk) from its beginnings in 1894 with Samuel Spencer to the end of the Southern in 1982 with Harold Hall. Many mechanical records are also on hand that were acquired from Hayne Shop; this includes much of the mechanical data for passenger cars and also a large amount of correspondence between the railroad and car builders on a variety of car series. The SRHA also has Marvin Black's large collection of diesel data and correspondence, Richard Prince's research and data, Southern Railway Public Relations Department files, as well as large amounts of other logs, dispatcher sheets, and much more.
We like to refer to our book collection as our library. This ranges from general railfan books to in depth reference data used by the railroads.
The SRHA also has a collection of artifacts from the Southern Railway. This includes station departure-arrival boards, lanterns, signals, maps, paintings, models, and more. Some of these items are on display around the archives, but most are in storage and will be lent to TVRM for display in future exhibits.
