We have identified and mapped diverse material evidences that comprised the railway system between 1868 and 1930 (sets of buildings and isolated buildings, machinery and tools, railways, documents) or its current protection (document and object collections, legally protected assets at the city, state or national levels). It was not intended to conduct an extensive identification of the building structures similar to a detailed historical/architectonic heritage inventory; however, some basic elements were identified, such as: description of the asset, geo-referenced data, building history, building techniques, blueprints, and photos of the buildings. In order to expand the databases, several additional fields were created to view the issues and purposes of this project, based on other inventory models used by Brazilian or foreign preservation bodies – IPHAN Railway Heritage Inventory, Personal Property Inventories of the National Institute of Cultural Heritage of Ecuador, “Inventário de Lineas de Ferrocarriles en Desuso” of the Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles.
We repeat that the purpose of this project is not to make an exhaustive inventory of all the railway stations in the state of São Paulo. The survey considered only those material assets that comprise certain railway sets (warehouses, workshops, management offices, railway towns, botanical gardens and eventually railway schools) or enable understanding and identifying the operation of the railway system between mid-19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
