1860 1871 1881 Railroad Lease Books Rensselaer Saratoga Albany Vermont Inventory For Sale

HISTORIC 3-PIECE CHRONOLOGICAL RAILROAD LOT: 1860, 1871 & 1881 Lease Booklets

A premier, museum-quality historical lot consisting of three remarkably well-preserved antique paper-wrapper booklets. This collection maps out the growth and integration of The Rensselaer & Saratoga Railroad Company network from the eve of the Civil War through the late Victorian era.

This trilogy provides a highly comprehensive look at 19th-century New York state corporate rail documentation, keeping a complete corporate history intact for collectors.

LOT COMPONENT DETAILS:1860 Albany & Vermont Lease First Edition (14 Pages): Printed by Weed, Parsons and Company in Albany, N.Y.

This foundational document establishes the Rensselaer & Saratoga's lease of the Albany and Vermont line for a yearly rent of $20,000. It features official printed certification blocks by Rensselaer County Clerk J. Thomas Davis and Commissioner Perry E. Smith.

1871 True First Edition (26 Pages): Printed concurrently with the contract's authorization by A. W. Scribner and Company, Printers in Troy, N.Y. Details the massive lease of the expanded Rensselaer & Saratoga system to the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company.

1881 Corporate Reprint (30 Pages): Issued ten years later by the Stowell Printing House, Cannon Place in Troy, N.Y., for updated internal corporate, legal, and shareholder record-keeping. Features a standardized late-Victorian serif layout.

HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHT: THE 1871 FLEET INVENTORY Of immense value to railroad historians and ephemera specialists, Page 26 of the 1871 and 1881 documents features a complete, itemized corporate inventory and appraisal of the entire railroad asset fleet dating to June 7, 1871.

The inventory documents a total valuation of $1,026,967, listing:37 Active Locomotives: Detailed by class tier, including twenty 1st-class engines valued at $10,000 each.839

Freight Cars: Broken down into 429 Box Cars, 149 Coal Cars, 228 Flat Cars, 30 Hay Cars, and 3 Crane Cars.

67 Passenger Coaches & Utility Cars: Featuring 38 elevated roof passenger cars, 1 luxurious corporate Directors' Car (appraised at a premium $8,000),

1 Pay Car, 23 Low Decks/Cabooses, and specialized Mail/Smoking cars.

Machinery & Facilities: Real estate valuations for the railroad shops located at Troy, Whitehall, Rutland, and Salem.

The later volumes contain printed official execution blocks signed off by corporate presidents Geo. H. Cramer (Rensselaer & Saratoga) and Thomas Dickson (Delaware & Hudson).

CONDITION REPORT: EXCELLENT ANTIQUARIAN CONDITIONAll three items are in exceptionally sound, clean condition for paper-wrapper documents of this age:

Interior Pages: Incredibly clean, crisp, and bright white. Free of heavy foxing, water staining, damp odors, or brittle edge crumbling. Text blocks remain perfectly readable, uniform, and sharp.

Covers & Binding: Original outer paper wrappers are fully intact across all three volumes. Minor, uniform edge-toning is present on the covers, completely standard for authentic 19th-century paper stock.

Spine bindings and string stitching remain fully intact.

Completeness: Total text pages are present across all three pamphlets with no cutouts, markings, or missing sheets. (Note: This listing is for the text pamphlets alone as originally bound; no supplemental fold-out system maps are enclosed).