United States
Library of Congress
Historic American Buildings Survey, Engineering Record, and Landscapes Survey.
Texas State Capitol 79 drawings
Browse HABS / HAER / HALSTechnical Drawings
A personal index of historical engineering and technical drawing collections with measurements or scale.
Featured collections
Examples from collections with especially useful groups of drawings.
United States
National Archives
Series of ship engineering drawings available online.
Armored Cruiser USS Maine 571 drawings
Browse ship drawings
Colorado, United States
Denver Public Library
Digital collections including building plans and railroad records.
Denver & Rio Grande Railway 35 drawings
Browse building plans
United States
Henry Ford Digital Collections
Ford Motor Company part drawings and other industrial documents.
Ford Model A drawings 890 drawings
Browse part drawings
United States
San Francisco Maritime
Booklets of General Plans for ships and other maritime subjects.
USS Growler, SSG-577 6 drawings
Browse general plans
Canada
Library and Archives Canada
Architectural and technical drawings in the national archives.
Parliament Buildings 83 drawings
Browse the archive
United States
SMU Digital Collections
Railroad engineering and New York bridge drawings.
Queensboro Bridge 200+ drawings
Browse railroad drawings
United Kingdom
Science Museum Group
Online railway drawings from the National Railway Museum collections.
North Eastern & LNER wagons about 100 drawings
See Derby works drawingsMore places to search
Useful collections without a featured example above.
Deutsche Fotothek
Construction drawings from the German Photo Library.
NYC Department of Records
Department of Buildings plans, plus Parks and Parkways drawings and plans.
Digital Public Library of America
A cross-institution search for technical drawings.
Jackson & Sharp plans
Railway car and ship plans in the Delaware Digital Collections.
New York Bridge Drawings
An additional SMU collection for bridge plans and engineering drawings.
WikiArquitectura
Architecture reference drawings; the Bangkok Skyscraper is a useful example.
Getting the full-resolution scans
Library of Congress
Search collection records for “Measured Drawing(s)” and download the TIFF for the high-resolution version.
Henry Ford
After inspecting a record, a tool such as dezoomify can retrieve the full-resolution image.
Science Museum Group
Use its Collections Online API to find the zoom URL, then replace the trailing .ptif with /full/full/0/default.tif.
WikiArquitectura
Open an image in a new tab and remove the size suffix from its URL, such as -1024x363, to request the original image.