The RAOA was founded July 25, 1888.  An objective was to bring uniformity and standardization to practices and forms.  Railroads were interchanging many millions of waybills and handling different sizes and arrangements of waybills (and other interline forms) had proven to be highly inefficient.  The waybills listed below were taken from the 1016 page book listing forms and some 172 mandatory rules and 571 recommended rules for freight traffic.  There are additional rules for passenger traffic, and other rules up to No. 2308 describing how interline accounts must/should be handled.  A number of these rules are important to those writing operations software (for example: weights, handling astray and misroutes), but it is the waybill forms that may be of greatest general interest.

The waybill forms listed below are [Mandatory], as the waybills were interchanged between railroads in the same way as freight cars were.  Individual railroads inserted their name and accounting number in the headings, as shown.