In the course of collecting railroad silver, I have kept up with the various auctions on eBay that sell silver plated items made by International Silver. There's some occasional confusion regarding the dating of these items, and this guide is meant to supply a few items of information that might be helpful. International Silver, along with its rival Reed & Barton, provided much of the silver that was used by hotels and railroads for decades. These heavy silver-plated items were designed to take the heavy use that these institutions would give them. For the most part, a particular hotel or railroad would make significant use of one particular pattern for an extended period of time. For example, the New York Central Railroad used the pattern "Century," on both flatware and other items, for decades. Some patterns would be used by a number of different entities. For example, "Century" was used not only by the New York Central, but also the Missouri Pacific, Texas Pacific, and the Panama Line. In my experience, International Silver started using pattern codes and dating codes around World War I (1915 is the earliest I have seen), and continued to do so well into the 1970s. The book Silver Banquet II states that this convention started in 1912. The dating code convention is fairly simple. If you look at the underside of most International Silver pieces, other than flatware (which carries neither a dating nor a model code), you will see a small square box with two digits in it. These two digits represent the year that the particular piece was manufactured. (This is corroborated by Silver Banquet II.) For example, a box with "30" in it will represent a piece manufactured in 1930. If you have multiple copies of a particular item, it's not at all unusual to have pieces with different years. I have a number of soup stand collars manufactured for the Union Pacific Railroad manufactured in different years in the 1950s, for example. The pattern codes for International Silver did vary. The coding seen most often is a five-digit code that would read: "05XXX," where the last three digits represent the particular pattern. For example, 05070 is the pattern code for Century, described above. The "Silver Banquet" books on railroad silver have more information as to the connection between certain five-digit codes and names. Other pieces of silverplate made by International Silver will carry pattern codes that use a combination of letters and numbers, such as SFO XXX, SGO XXX or SLO XXX. I have also seen items with three or four digit codes. However, the five-digit code seems to have been the most common between ca. 1920 and 1970. Including a precise description of the dating code and pattern code is of great assistance to would-be purchasers of your items, as they can check to see if they match other items in their collection. Two other notes: if an item is marked "International Silver," it is no older than ca. 1899, when a number of companies merged to form International Silver. In addition, some pieces will bear a patent date, but this is not necessarily the date of manufacture; an item may have been manufactured some years after the patent was granted. The two digits in the box is the crucial dating data to look for.