Cog Railway research · 1866 to the present
Prof. Tim “Jitney Jr” Lewis · Outsider’s Inc.
Eleven published volumes covering the people, the operations and the paper trail of the Mt. Washington Cog Railway, the world’s first mountain-climbing railway. Around 6,100 pages of manuscript, freely downloadable, alongside a database of the women and men who worked there. This page explains what the project is, where to get it, and how to search all of it at once.
The project
The Jitney Years Project is an academic research effort directed by Prof. Tim “Jitney Jr” Lewis, retired from Northern Vermont University. It is independent of the railway. Its stated purpose is to collect and collate the names of the people who worked on the Mt. Washington Railway from 1866 onward, and to publish the history that surrounds them.
This basic academic research website is not affiliated with the railroad. It is designed to collect and collate names of the women and men who worked on the Mt. Washington Railway… jitneyyears.org
Two things come out of that work. The first is an interactive employee database, currently holding more than 3,200 records with photographs and profiles where they exist, against a target of roughly 10,000 across the railway’s 157 years. The second is The Jitney Years itself: a manuscript series in five volumes, several of them split across multiple files, written with Norman “Jitney” Lewis and published by Outsider’s Inc.
The project is crowd-sourced and still open. Corrections, additions and identifications of people in photographs are actively wanted, and go directly to Jitney Jr at jitneyjr@jitneyyears.org.
The employee database is separate from the manuscripts and searchable on its own: Cog Railway People & History ↗
The manuscripts
Every volume is a free PDF hosted on jitneyyears.org. They are large, because they are image-heavy. Page counts, file sizes and revision dates below are as the project lists them.
| Volume | Covers | Pages | Size | Revised | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operating Manual | |||||
| Vol. 1 | Running the train: engine mechanics, the brakeman, fireman and engineer, a day’s work, worksite history | 765 | 333 MB | Aug 2026 | |
| Employee Roster | |||||
| Vol. 2A | Surnames A–I, with biographical entries | 715 | 332 MB | Jun 2025 | |
| Vol. 2B | Surnames J–Z, the original edition | 579 | 208 MB | Mar 2023 | |
| Vol. 2B update | Revised J–L section, supersedes that part of the original | 218 | 79 MB | Aug 2026 | |
| Vol. 2C | Addendum: new names and corrections across the whole roster | 24 | 5 MB | Aug 2026 | |
| Aggregated Timeline | |||||
| Vol. 3A | 1866–1967, collated newspaper coverage by ownership era | 918 | 345 MB | Jun 2025 | |
| Vol. 3B | 1968–2024 | 948 | 438 MB | Jun 2025 | |
| Vol. 3C | 2025 to the present | 153 | 90 MB | Aug 2026 | |
| Appendix, Documents & Maps | |||||
| Vol. 4 | Specialized topics: other cog railways, accidents, lawsuits, military history, hotel history, family histories | 986 | 243 MB | Aug 2026 | |
| Vol. 5 | Transcribed primary sources: charters, patents, court cases, leases, state inspections, maps and buildings | 830 | 213 MB | Aug 2026 | |
The finding aid
The volumes are the record, but at 2.3 gigabytes spread across eleven files they are hard to look something up in. jitney.amongthe.cloud is a finding aid built from their text layer: one search box across the whole series, with a result telling you the volume and the page.
It holds no copy of the manuscripts beyond their text and page images, it collects nothing about anyone who uses it, and it is not a replacement for the volumes. It is a way of finding which of the 6,146 pages you actually needed. Page numbers throughout are PDF page numbers, which usually run a little ahead of the number printed on the sheet.
Roughly 200 pages are photographic plates or scanned drawings with no machine-readable text. Those pages have an image in the finding aid but cannot be found by searching for words on them.
Credit
The manuscripts, the research and the employee database are the work of Prof. Tim “Jitney Jr” Lewis and Norman “Jitney” Lewis, published by Outsider’s Inc. as an educational, not-for-profit enterprise under Creative Commons, and dependent, in the project’s own words, on the kindness and generosity of the Cog family.
The search index hosted here is derived from the published PDFs and claims no rights of its own. If you use anything from it, cite the volume and page and credit the Jitney Years Project. Corrections to the history itself belong with Jitney Jr at jitneyjr@jitneyyears.org, not here.