Three Early Railroad Equipment Contracts

The use of highly specialized techniques for financing equipment on railroads in the United States became common soon after the Civil War. Comparatively little is known, however, of their origins and early evolution. Much of the published information on early railroad equipment financing is concerned with federal, State, and municipal government aids to the new railroads. Because public financing was a matter of public record, that story has been preserved in considerable detail. Unfortunately this has not been the case with private financing. The lack of specific data in this field has obscured important historical precedents for the equipment trust and conditional sale agreements, which were to become so important in the later decades of the 19th century. It is particularly interesting, therefore, to examine some original and hitherto unpublished manuscript material which presents examples of railroad equipment financing as early as 1838.