Like many railfans (including the great E. M. Frimbo) I keep track of my mileage. I have a spreadsheet with the trains and routes I’ve been on, including dates and most importantly distances. I can tell you that I passed 100,000 miles on Amtrak on January 7, 2020, on the Capitol Limited, roughly 163 miles west of Washington, DC. This means I can I get a little obsessive about determining mileage, and can send me down a rabbit hole if it’s unclear what distance I traveled.
Railroads used to include mileage information in their timetables. Amtrak did right up until the discontinuance of paper timetables in the last few years. For railroads in Europe, the best source of information are the railway atlases published by Schweers + Wall. These maps are extraordinarily detailed, showing lines and distances (in kilometers). For the US, the best source of distance are employee timetables. As the source suggests, these are internal documents used by employees. They show distances, sidings, speed limits, and include various rules governing operation. Distance doesn’t change all that often, so older employee timetables can still be useful.
I’ve made 14 trips on NJ Transit’s Raritan Valley Line since 2016. But first, a nomenclature issue. The Raritan Valley Line is both a physical piece of infrastructure and a service that uses that infrastructure and the two are not coterminous. The service runs from High Bridge, New Jersey (Raritan on weekdays) to Newark, New Jersey. A limited number of trains continue from Newark to Pennsylvania Station in New York, but usually you transfer in New York.
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