Hello and welcome to the second-to-last MQ adventure for 2025! I still can't believe this has been the seventh year of quests, and I really appreciate how many of you have joined me for my adventures in history. I have one more regular post lined up for next week, and then in December I'll be doing the annual wrap-up where we look at statistics and fun facts. After that, as my longtime readers know, I'll be taking the rest of December off because of my day job being in retail.
This week we're heading back out west to Blair County to look at trains. I do like trains.
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| The marker stands at the former Altoona Shops at the intersection of Ninth Avenue and 13th Street. |
This post, though, is about the main complex where trains were built and serviced. It started in 1849, when the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) started setting up shop in Altoona. The town had been set up for this exact purpose, as I mentioned in my post about Altoona's marker, and the PRR wanted to have their own repair facility in this important hub. This made sense; the PRR's main terminal points were in Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, and Altoona is roughly halfway between them. The following year, they had taken over a chunk of the area on 12th Street, where they had several facilities inside of a long building, including a machine shop and foundry.
Just five years later, they had a thousand employees. While the PRR had been buying its locomotives from other manufacturers, they quickly got into building their own steam engines, and the Altoona facility was soon turning out freight cars and passenger cars as well as repairing them. The Civil War only added to the importance of the railroad. In 1875, Alexander Graham Bell dispatched two of his personal assistants to the Altoona Works in order to figure out how to install telephone lines, which were completed two years later. Also in 1875, the company opened a testing department, and the PRR became the nation's leader in developing research and testing procedures for the entire industry. By 1890, the PRR was transporting roughly twenty million people across the commonwealth, and more than sixty million tons of freight.
With the dawn of the 20th century, the PRR's holdings were sprawling across almost 250 acres of Altoona's cityscape. They had created four separate complexes for their work - the Altoona Machine Shops, the Juniata Locomotive Shops, the Altoona Car Shops, and the South Altoona Foundries. They also had the massive East Altoona roundhouse, which at 395 feet across was one of the largest in the world. (A roundhouse is, as the name implies, a round or round-ish building where locomotives were stored and serviced, and it uses a massive turntable on the ground to point the engine in the direction it needs to go.) This roundhouse was able to provide service for 300 train engines each day.
Naturally, this much work provided jobs for thousands of people, particularly the huge influx of immigrants passing through Ellis Island and other points of entry. The year 1930 featured the highest employment roster for the PRR shops, with 82,000 workers.
That's not to say it was all fun and games. The 1877 railroad riots of Pittsburgh had an impact on the Altoona shops, though it didn't stop the work entirely. The PRR didn't want the workers unionizing, so they established their own company unions to provide labor management and mediate issues, which worked for a time. There was another strike in 1911, not in Altoona but threatening to impact the workers there, and the PRR responded by threatening to relocate their shops. Such a move would have been devastating to the population of Altoona, since most could not afford to move with the shops and would therefore lose their jobs. As a result, when yet another strike happened in 1922, the Altoona shop workers refused to participate because they were too afraid to lose their jobs. Altoona didn't have many other job opportunities apart from the railroad shops, and many of the workers were homeowners. Because they continued working through the strike, unionists outside of Altoona gave the city the unpleasant nickname of "scab town".
World War II brought the railroad shops, and Horseshoe Curve along with them, to the attention of the Nazis. Operation Pastorius, as it was known, included both facilities on its target list, but the saboteurs were caught before they could carry out the plan.
However, the story of the rest of the facility doesn't end there. When the commonwealth decided to build an official state railroad museum in Strasburg, rather than Altoona, a lot of local people were a little bit upset. So they started a grassroots effort to have a second museum built in Altoona, which opened in 1980 in an exhibit hall built for the purpose. The Railroaders Memorial Museum formed from a nucleus of collectibles donated by local residents, though they added to it over time. By 1998, the PRR Master Mechanic's office building had been restored and the museum moved into this, on the site of the former Altoona Machine Shops. A few ears later they acquired the Horseshoe Curve National Historic Landmark and opened a visitor's center and museum there. We visited that one, but we had to save the RMM for our next trip to Altoona. The RMM is continually improving and adding and upgrading, so it's a dynamic destination for railroad fans of all ages and I'm looking forward to seeing what it has to offer when I get the chance.
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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