Valuation Act of 1913

[NW Mailing List]

Thank you, Mr. Burnett for these useful links to railroad valuation maps. You stated that "These were the Valuation maps as submitted to the Bureau of Valuation of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and are dated 1916. (The Valuation Act [Act]
was one of the greatest boondoggles ever foisted on the taxpayers, and its reporting and bookkeeping requirement continued into the 1960s."

I will leave it to other historians for a determination whether the Act was a boondoggle. However, my understanding is that taxpayers did not pay for railroads to document the assets it owned. Most railroads were profitable in that era before the rise of competitive transportation modes. Complying with the Valuation Act was a deduction from a railroad's gross income and it was indeed an expensive proposition. As with other aspects of railroad operations, all costs are paid by the people who were paying for freight and express shipments, as well as passenger travel.

The reason for the Act was to establish what the actual railroad assets were and their total value. It is essential for any business to have proven documentation of its assets as part of its accounting system. The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) needed this determination when considering whether rates were just and reasonable. It also aided stock and bond-holders because a railroad was allowed to earn a reasonable rate of return on its assets which was six percent as I recall. Thus, the Act was a foundation principle of balancing the needs of railroad owners and users. It also established a pattern that was followed by other federal, state, and local public utility regulation, such as state commissions for intrastate transportation commerce or electric, gas, and water utilities.

As an example of the historical benefit of these maps, attached is a very small segment from V7-VA-96, June 30, 1916. It depicts the configuration and size of stock pens at Boyce. I have not observed this information or a drawing elsewhere. As Mr. Burnett stated in his posting, a computer with photo-editing capability is essential. After snipping the image from the original plat and saving it as a new file, the resolution is high enough to clearly delineate features. The next step was to invert the blueprint colors, then both increase the contrast and birghtness, as well as removing unrelated notations.

Thank you, Mr. B.!

Frank

Dr. Frank R. Scheer, Curator
Railway Mail Service Library, Inc.
f_scheer at yahoo.com
(540) 837-9090 - daytime cell
In the 1913 former N&W Railway depot along Clarke County route 723
117 East Main Street
Boyce, VA 22620-9369
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