This series consists of scrapbooks - some bound, some consisting of disbound pages foldered together and from which the photographs have been subsequently removed and enveloped- that contain photographs of trains, engines, train cars, and other railroad-related equipment. Railroads depicted include freight, passenger, and urban transit. The material is alphabetically organized by the name of the railroad or the company that owned and operated the train depicted (and occasionally by location, such as a terminal or a country). The collection follows Vander Maas' original order, so subjects may appear occasionally out of alphabetical order. A few images are actually postcards, rather than photographs. Subseries I originally consisted of loose pages disbound from scrapbooks at one time, probably by Vander Maas. They have been removed from the acidic pages and are now being stored in acid-free photo envelopes. The images in Subseries I tend towards those of passenger and urban transit. The date range for these images is much wider than that of the bound books in Subseries II. The bound scrapbooks in Subseries II date more frequently from the latter half of the 20th century, and tend more heavily towards images of engines, freight cars, and other non-passenger equipment. (Vander Maas identified many, though not all, of these bound books as "Power and Equipment".) Many railroads and companies have images in both series. Most of the images have handwritten notes accompanying them that provide additional information, such as the engine number or type, location, or date. Most of the images date from the 20th century. The earliest image in the collection, of the Philadelphia and Reading, dates from 1847 (although the photograph itself is of a later date).