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  The Gerald E. Brookins Collection

  The Gerald E. Brookins Collection is the archive of his Trolleyville, U.S.A. (also known as the Gerald E. Brookins Museum of Electric Railways) streetcar operation in Olmsted Township, Ohio, and related materials on urban transportation history. Included are materials he had acquired, including the Morris Stone model streetcar collection and many photographs reported to be by transit historian Harry Christiansen. Read more about Trolleyville, U.S.A. from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

  This collection was donated to Special Collections at the Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University by the Lake Shore Electric Railway Association, the successor to Trolleyville, and by Brookins' son, Gary Brookins, as a tribute to his mother and father.

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  The Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad: Cleveland's Iron Cross

  Stephen Gage, Whitney Foster, and Lynn M. Duchez Bycko

  The Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad (WLE) was founded in 1871 and it was originally designed to span the distance from the Ohio River through the coal fields of southeastern Ohio to the ports on Lake Erie. Over several decades the WLE would grow through construction and mergers into a significant transport feed to Cleveland’s growing industries, mainly freighting coal. In the beginning, however, only 13.5 miles of track had been laid by 1887, and the railroad was jokingly called the "Wailing and Leg Weary."

  After several early financial embarrassments, including a complete shutdown in 1879, Jay Gould, an American financier who became a leading American railroad developer and speculator, began buying large amounts of Wheeling’s stock the following year. With the fresh influx of funding, construction resumed.

  Containing over one thousand photos in many different sizes and dating from 1863 to 1962, these photos are housed in 18 archival file boxes. Included with the photographs is a registry which lists the location of many assets by division and branch. This collection originally served to document railroad property, as the Interstate Commerce Commission mandated that all U.S. railroads photograph all assets, including equipment, motive power, towers, bridges and more. The purpose of this was to levy taxes on these items to be paid to the government. The Michael Schwartz Library purchased the Wheeling and Lake Erie photographs in 2000 from a collector.

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  Cleveland, Ohio Along the Nickel Plate Road® During the 1920s

  William G. Becker

  In 1922 the New York, Chicago, & St. Louis Railway (Nickel Plate Railway or NKP) took a series of photographs along its right-of-way and adjacent neighborhoods from Euclid through the west side of Cleveland.

  In 1926 the Nickel Plate took a second series of photographs. These documented the original conditions of the right-of-way and the adjacent neighborhood for a grade elimination project that was undertaken as part of the Cleveland Union Terminal construction project.

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  Stereoscopic Images of Cleveland in 3D

  The following images are scenes taken from historic stereoview cards showing Cleveland and the wider Great Lakes industrial region and converted into 3-D images.

  To be able to view the full effect of the 3-D renderings, anaglyph 3-D glasses (red/cyan) are required. href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyphs>Find out more about anaglyph images from Wikipedia.

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  Cleveland Union Terminal Online

  William G. Becker

  The Cleveland Union Terminal Collection is the archives of the company that built the Terminal Tower, the union passenger station, the complex of office buildings, post office, department store and the infrastructure of tracks, bridges, signals, electrical catenary structures and yard facility buildings necessary to switch passenger coaches over from steam to electric and bring them in to the downtown area. This was a massive urban redevelopment project that foreshadowed the Rockefeller Center, in New York; gave Cleveland the third-tallest building in the world in 1930; and forever changed the face of Public Square and wide swaths of adjoining neighborhoods.