Even as a child, the Editor was inclined to enjoy things related to railroads.

He is I, Tom Gloger, who collected and organized the material for Tom's 1938 Register.  Wanting authentic sources and destinations for the freight moved on my 1938-era HO model railroad, I started accumulating data wherever I could find it.  That collection grew and eventually became a book and (3¾ years later) a CD-ROM.

I have books printed in lots of twenty.  If there's enough demand, I have more printed, but I have no publisher other than myself.  CD-ROM production is an "on demand" operation, meaning I produce a CD-ROM from the most recent data when an order comes in.

It is a collection of information, historical in nature, intended for model railroaders who wish to know more about the origins of products and goods available in sizable quantities as of 1938.  It includes information such as:

• Company Name
• City and State
• Products made
• Nearest Railroad(s)
• Any other information deemed worth passing on, including products used, company size, advertising slogans, shipping information, and what not.

The 250-page book is organized into categories in a manner similar to the yellow classified section of a telephone book,

The CD-ROM has an enhanced version of the database used to produce the book, six text files containing pre-sorted database information, and five text files of related information from the book, all in several file formats.

In addition to the Company Listings, it contains information to assist a model railroader in planning the delivery of shipments or designing a 1930s layout, including:

• U.S. Maps, including two blank ones for making notes.
• Suggestions for modeling the 1930s.
• A glossary of information about things mentioned in the listings.
• A table of weights and measures to help assess the bulk of a load.
• Railroad name information.
• A bibliography to help readers who wish to undertake additional research.
• "Filler" material to convey additional information about various industries.

Most material written about the 1930s tell about the closed factories, high unemployment, slow economic conditions, and increasing isolationism.  While this was true, and provided valuable background information, it didn't make for very interesting model railroading.  When I looked in books written during the 1930s, I found there were thousands of companies still in business, employing millions of people, developing innovative products, and engaging in widespread foreign trade.  That's the side of the 1930s I've tried to convey.

The laminated tagstock covers are green (about like this web page) with the picture and captions seen at the top of this page, plus some instructions, suggestions on how the book may be used, and the table of contents.  It is bound with a black plastic "comb" binding, measures about 9 × 11 inches, and is about ⁵/8 of an inch thick.  The inside pages are printed on high-opacity white paper.
Here's a "screen shot" of a typical page from the 227-page Company Listings section that makes up the bulk of the book.

It has a green and black label, similar to the book cover, and comes in a slim jewel case.

In order to be useful to as many programs as possible, the CD-ROM contains numerous variations on nine basic files, and instructions to help you select the variations best suited for your programs.  There are:

• Ten variations of the database, each containing all the company records.
• Seventy-two variations of text files containing the database information sorted six ways:
  • By Product Type, Company, and City (as in the book)
  • By State, City, and Company.
  • By Company Name, City, and Product Type.
  • By Railroad, Product type, and Company.
  • By Railroad, State and city, Company.
  • By Railroad, Company, and City.
• Six variations each of the five text files of related information.

Here's a sample section of one of the files.

There is information for all 48 of the United States (that's all we had back then) and information about port facilities for import and export of products all over the world.

I gleaned most of it from the travel guides written under the auspices of the Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the late 1930s and very early 1940s.  I have worked from originals or reprints of the original guides for all 48 states and several of the large cities, and added to this from many other reliable sources.  The bibliography is nearly seven pages long.

Click here to see ordering information.

I tried to write most of it from an early 1938 perspective, but some later information may have slipped through.  There are side notes reflecting earlier and later information.  The later information is in square brackets, like editor's notes.

I used the time I could have used in model railroading and other pastimes, and then some.

A model railroader whose railroad "interchanges" with the rest of the world may be interested in authentic information on the area of the country or specific companies to and from which shipments of products were made during this era.
Someone with a historical bent may be interested in the industrial condition of the country prior to the start of World War II.

I was originally interested in the World War II era, but thought I'd work up to it gradually.  I then got curious about the conditions leading up to the war, and began to do further research.  Some of the things I found were very interesting, and I have become very enthusiastic about the period.

The name is a tip of the hat to the well-known (but unrelated) Thomas Register, an invaluable reference used by businesses to locate manufacturers of industrial products.  This collection is shorter and less formal, hence "Tom's," and only pertains to 1938.  It also contains products (such as fresh foods) and information (such as railroad connectivity) that a 1938 Thomas Register would not have contained.

My computerized waybill program insists on knowing where each shipment comes from and goes to.  After a while, I got tired of inventing fictitious companies, and began wondering where the real ones were.  Once I learned of the WPA guides, there was no logical stopping place until I had covered all 48 states.

The green color approximates the color I choose for the book's cover and the CD-ROM's label.  The rather stark layout and dearth of glitzy graphics is the result of a desire to keep this web page as small and easy to download as possible.  The picture, drawn by yours truly, is from the cover of the book.

Here are a few more-or-less good reasons:  You don’t need to be computer literate to use it.  You don’t even need a computer!  Paper and ink are a more traditional approach to early twentieth century information.  You may find it easier to compare two entries to decide which company better suits your need when they’re all on the same page.  It opens faster than the CD-ROM, and has nice margins on which to make notes.  With the CD-ROM, you may never get to see some fascinating bit of information that happens to be on an adjoining page.  The CD-ROM you receive will be “frozen in time” when it is created for you, whereas additions and corrections, past, present and future, can be written in the book with pencil or pen.  Corrections & additions are available on-line.  You can still read the book if it gets scratched or bent.  It’s larger than a CD-ROM, and thus harder to lose. 

Again, here are a few more-or-less good reasons:  Once the file you want is open, you will be able to search much faster than in the book.  You can search for select types of information, such as all customers served by the CRI&G.  In the CD-ROM’s text files, the data is pre-sorted six ways instead of just one.  The Pre-sorted Text files look good and you can easily search them.  If you use a database program, you can sort the information any way you want.  The CD-ROM costs less than the book.  It doesn’t take up as much room on the shelf.  Depending on the programs you use, you may be able to copy and paste information directly into your waybill program.  The book was published in 2001, and doesn’t already include the years of additions and corrections made to the data since then.  The CD-ROM is current as of April, 2007, and depending on the programs you use, you may be able to add future additions & changes to the copy(ies) of the file(s) you've copied to your hard drive.  Under bright lights, the CD-ROM glistens and gleams with shimmering polychromatic rainbows of glorious light, while the book just lays there and looks green.

Send it to me, and I'll try to answer it.  My e-mail address is tomgloger@yahoo.com.

The book has 250 8½ × 11 pages, and contains information on over 2,600 factories, warehouses, mines, packing houses, and other sources of railroad traffic.

The CD-ROM contains slightly more information, in a number of different files.  A typical file is in the neighborhood of 1 Megabyte.  The database files have over 3,600 records containing information on 2600+ factories, warehouses, etc.

About four years of spare time.  I began around 1993 or 1994.  Most of the research was complete by mid-1996, but I didn't get serious about getting the book printed until 1999.  Then it took about a year to organize and format the information to make it easy to use.

Even starting with the database created to produce the book, the CD-ROM took several months to prepare: The original database only had to work right in one printed form, but making it suitable for different sorts and searches required considerable changes and standardization of content.

I'm aware of two other collections of this sort of data.  One is a database concentrating on the post-1950 period.  1938 and 1950 are separated by a dozen years and one Duesie of a war, so there is a considerable difference between this data and that.  The other is a copy of the 1938/1939 Union Pacific Freight Shippers Guide and Directory, produced by Ted Schnepf, which primarily covers towns served by the UP.  (Ted also sells similar reprinted guides for C&NW in 1923, Milwaukee Road in 1943, C&EI in 1950, and the Chicago Switching District in 1956.)

Each collection has its strong points:

• Tom's 1938 Register goes beyond basic facts in several areas, to provide background information to help the reader better understand each industry and how it interacted with other industries.
• The last I heard, the "1950" database contains over 30,000 entries, tells what was shipped and received, and can be downloaded from the Internet or accessed at http://model-rr.crispen.org/industries/index.php.
• The UP Guide has thousands of entries, with a bit of background on many of them, and costs $29.95 + shipping.  (Contact Ted Schnepf for this, as I have no connection with him except as a satisfied customer.)
• I have focused on the U.S. in 1938.
• The "1950" database contains data from Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, from any time over a period of four decades or more, including several entries for companies located only on model railroads.
• The UP Guide's entries are nearly all in UP territory west of the Missouri River.

I think there's enough of a difference here that we are not in competition with each other.  Choose whichever source(s) meet your needs.

The impressive (and possibly contradictory) claims made by some of the companies are included "as is."  In some cases where information was uncertain, I made an educated guess and indicated it as such.  On occasion, additional information is brought to my attention.  When that happens, I will make it available here.  I did put one joke each in the CD-ROM and the book, but they're not in a position in which they would mislead anyone.  Other than that, to the best of my knowledge, Tom's 1938 Register contains only authentic historical information.

Send me e-mail, and tell me what else you want to know.

I thought you'd never ask!  The ordering information is below.