The Pennsylvania Railroad 🚂 Penn Station, Horseshoe Curve and the Paper the Pennsy Left Behind
🚂 I have a soft spot for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Folks called it the Pennsy, and for a good long stretch it was the biggest company on Earth. It built the grandest train station America ever had, bent its tracks around a mountain to get to Pittsburgh, and ran a locomotive shop so big it was a town all its own.
Then it was gone. It merged in 1968, went bankrupt in 1970, and today most people know its name from a square on a Monopoly board. What it left behind is paper: bonds, stock certificates and booklets, engraved and printed with real pride. I have a whole shelf of it, so let me tell you the story the paper tells.
🏛️ What was the Pennsylvania Railroad?
The Pennsylvania Railroad was a Philadelphia company, chartered by the state in 1846 to build a railroad from Philadelphia west to Pittsburgh. Every one of its stock certificates prints the date it was incorporated: April 13, 1846.
It was born out of a race. That same year the Pennsylvania legislature had two applications in front of it for a line to Pittsburgh, one from the new Pennsylvania company and one from the Baltimore and Ohio. Philadelphia's merchants were afraid Baltimore would grab the western trade. The B&O's bill would kick in only if the Pennsylvania company failed to raise its money and start building within a year. It didn't fail, and the governor voided the B&O's rights that August.
Samuel Vaughan Merrick, one of the founders, became the first president on March 31, 1847. The company's great builder was its chief engineer and then president, J. Edgar Thomson, who ran it from 1852 to 1874.
🧭 How big did the Pennsy get?
Big doesn't quite cover it. In 1857 the railroad bought the state's old Main Line of Public Works for $7.5 million. On July 1, 1869 it leased the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago, and that put Pennsy trains into Chicago.
By 1882 it was the largest railroad, the largest transportation company and the largest corporation in the world. By the end of 1926 the system ran more than 11,600 miles of line. In 1916 it started calling itself "the Standard Railroad of the World," and it meant every word.
The look was as famous as the size. The emblem was a keystone, for the Keystone State, with the letters PRR woven inside it. Passenger cars wore a deep brick color the railroad called Tuscan red, and the locomotives wore a very dark green.
🏔️ What is Horseshoe Curve?
Horseshoe Curve is the trick that got the Pennsy over the Allegheny Mountains. It sits about five miles west of Altoona, and instead of attacking the mountain head on, the track swings around the head of a valley in a great 220-degree bend about 2,375 feet long. That keeps the climb gentle enough for a heavy train.
Thomson laid out the route, and the curve opened on February 15, 1854, with the line from Altoona to Johnstown. It was so famous that a park for watching the trains opened beside it in 1879, the first one of its kind. Today you can ride a little funicular up the hill or climb 194 steps to get there.
It mattered enough that in June 1942 Nazi Germany sent saboteurs to blow it up, in a plot called Operation Pastorius. Four men landed on Long Island, and the FBI caught the lot of them after one, George John Dasch, turned himself in. The curve became a National Historic Landmark on November 13, 1966, and freight trains still climb it every day.
The Pennsy put the curve right on its own stock. Its later certificates, from the late 1950s and the 1960s, carry an engraving of a streamlined train winding around a mountain valley under the PRR keystone, between two round medallions of classical figures with locomotive wheels. I have it in green and in orange. Both print a par value of $10 a share and the 1846 incorporation date.
🔧 Why was Altoona so important?
Altoona was the Pennsy's workshop. The railroad planned its repair shops in 1849 at a town newly set up for the purpose, and construction started in 1850. It grew into machine shops, car shops, the Juniata locomotive shop and foundries.
For many years it was the largest railroad shop complex in the world. In the 1920s it had about 125 buildings on 218 acres and more than 16,000 workers. Between 1866 and 1946 Altoona built 6,783 locomotives, steam, diesel and electric. Norfolk Southern still uses parts of it today.
📘 What is in the 1939 "Modern Locomotives and Cars" booklet?
This is the railroad showing off. "Modern Locomotives and Cars 1939" is a 32-page booklet from the Pennsylvania Railroad, with photographs and the specifications of its engines and cars. It opens on the inside front cover with the early days. The John Bull, placed in service on the Camden and Amboy in 1831, is called "the first locomotive used on any line now included in the Pennsylvania System."
Then it jumps to the present, and the present in 1939 was the S-1. The booklet says the railroad was "placing on the rails the largest, fastest, most powerful passenger steam locomotive." Only one S-1 was ever built, number 6100, finished at Altoona on January 31, 1939. Raymond Loewy shaped its streamlined shroud from a clay model tested in a wind tunnel.
The S-1 went straight to the 1939 New York World's Fair, lettered "American Railroads," and ran on a roller platform at 60 miles an hour for the crowds. Its fastest verified run was 100.97 miles an hour on level track in December 1940. It was too big for most of the system, so it worked between Chicago and Crestline, Ohio, and crews called it "The Big Engine." It was scrapped in 1949.
There's plenty more inside. The streamlined K-4s number 3768 got its Loewy shroud in 1936, and crews nicknamed it "The Torpedo." The E-6s Atlantic was the class of engine number 460. On June 11, 1927 that engine raced newsreel film of Charles Lindbergh from Washington to New York against an airplane. The plane landed first, but the film on 460 reached theaters hours ahead.
My favorite little detail is a horse car. Express car 5863, built "for race and other valuable horses" and holding 24 of them, is lettered "DEL MAR TURF CLUB." That's the California racetrack Bing Crosby helped found in 1936, the one where the turf meets the surf.
The booklet counts the fleet as of January 1, 1939: 4,753 locomotives, 6,499 passenger cars and 238,101 freight cars. The back cover is a GG-1 electric, and the map inside is credited to Rand McNally.
⚡ What was the GG-1?
The GG-1 was the Pennsy's great electric locomotive, built from 1934 to 1943. On February 1, 1935 the Congressional ran between New York and Washington in regular electric service, pulled by the first GG-1.
Loewy had a hand in this one too. He recommended a smooth welded body instead of a riveted one and added the gold pinstripes. The prototype kept its rivets, so it earned the nickname "Old Rivets." GG-1s kept running until New Jersey Transit retired the last of them in 1983. The booklet calls it the first electric passenger locomotive of its type to be streamlined.
🗽 What happened to Pennsylvania Station?
Pennsylvania Station in New York was the Pennsy's crown. President Alexander Cassatt, brother of the painter Mary Cassatt, pushed to bring trains into Manhattan through tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers, so travelers no longer had to finish the trip by ferry. He died on December 28, 1906, almost four years before it opened.
McKim, Mead & White designed it. The main waiting room was inspired by the baths of ancient Rome, those of Caracalla, Diocletian and Titus, and it was 150 feet tall. Long Island trains started using it on September 8, 1910, and Pennsy trains followed on November 27. It was the largest indoor space in New York City, and in 1945 more than 100 million passengers passed through it.
Then the railroad sold the air rights, and demolition began on October 28, 1963 to make way for Madison Square Garden and an office tower. The New York Times called it a "monumental act of vandalism." Architectural historian Vincent Scully said it best: "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat."
Losing it changed the city. New York passed its landmarks law in 1965, and in 1978 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that law, which saved Grand Central. On January 1, 2021, the new Moynihan Train Hall opened across Eighth Avenue in the old Farley Post Office.
📜 Why does a 1934 Pennsy bond say nothing about gold?
The 1934 Series E bond is a General Mortgage 4¼% Bond, $1,000, dated July 1, 1934 and due July 1, 1984. It's olive green and black on cream, with "PENNSYLVANIA" in the pale security printing and a sheet of interest coupons attached. At the top is an engraving of a great colonnaded station with early automobiles and people crowding the street, which matches New York's Penn Station.
The Series E issue was $50 million of 50-year bonds, offered through Kuhn, Loeb & Co. at the end of June 1934 at 97½. The railroad's own chronology calls it the first large sale of securities since the Securities Act of 1933. The money retired older 6½% gold bonds due in 1936.
And here is the fun part. The Pennsy's 1931 Series D printed the words "GOLD BOND." Series E doesn't. On June 5, 1933, Congress had voided gold-payment clauses in public and private debts. So the 1934 bond promises payment "in such coin or currency of the United States of America as at the time of payment is legal tender for public and private debts." That sentence is the Depression written in steel.
🎖️ How was a wartime railroad bond sold?
The 1945 Series F bond is a General Mortgage 3⅛% Bond, $1,000, dated January 1, 1945 and due January 1, 1985. It's printed in deep blue and black by the American Bank Note Company, under the same style of Penn Station engraving.
The rate on it was set at an auction. In May 1944 the Interstate Commerce Commission began requiring competitive bidding on big railroad bond issues. Robert R. Young and Cyrus Eaton had campaigned against the bankers' hold on railroad finance. So the Pennsy asked for sealed bids, due by "12 noon, Eastern War Time" on January 9, 1945, and let each bidder name the interest rate.
Its old banker, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., still won. It bid for a 3⅛% coupon, while two rivals asked for 3¼%, and the bonds went out to the public right away. The whole Series F came to $60 million, and it paid off $60 million of 4½% debentures from 1930 on April 1, 1945. That was the same day American troops landed on Okinawa.
The bond has a story in the signatures too. The treasurer on it in 1945 was H. W. Schotter, who in 1927, as assistant treasurer, wrote the company's own history in his spare hours. It's titled "The Growth and Development of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company." The trustee was Philadelphia's Girard Trust Company, whose marble headquarters at Broad and Chestnut was modeled on the Pantheon and is a Ritz-Carlton today. Girard Trust's president, James E. Gowen, sat on the Pennsy's board.
Interest came due every January 1 and July 1. You clipped the dated coupon and presented it at the railroad's office in Philadelphia or its agency in Manhattan. At the end of 1943, the offering said, the railroad had 10,133 miles of first track, 4,448 locomotives and 225,331 freight cars.
🐎 What is on the older Pennsy stock certificates?
Before the Horseshoe Curve design, the Pennsy's certificates carried the coat of arms of Pennsylvania itself. Two rearing horses flank a shield with a ship, a plow and sheaves of wheat, an eagle sits on top, and the ribbon reads "VIRTUE, LIBERTY AND INDEPENDENCE." They print a par value of $50 a share, and American Bank Note's Philadelphia office engraved them.
The orange certificate for less than 100 shares carries that design, which turns up on certificates from the 1910s right into the 1950s. The green 100-share certificate prints Irving Trust Company as its registrar. The bank only took that name in 1929, so the green ones belong to the 1930s through the 1950s.
🎲 Is the Pennsylvania Railroad on the Monopoly board?
Yes. The Pennsylvania Railroad is one of the four railroads on the classic American Monopoly board, along with the Reading, the B&O and the Short Line. That makes a Pennsy certificate a pretty wonderful gift for the family Monopoly champion. It cost $200 on the board, and you can hang the real thing on the wall for a lot less.
🛤️ What happened to the Pennsy?
On February 1, 1968, the Pennsylvania merged with its old rival, the New York Central, to form Penn Central. On June 21, 1970, Penn Central filed for bankruptcy, the biggest corporate bankruptcy America had seen up to then.
Amtrak took over passenger service in 1971, and Conrail took the freight lines on April 1, 1976. When Conrail was split in 1999, Norfolk Southern got most of the old Pennsy track, Horseshoe Curve included. Amtrak runs the electrified line from New York to Washington that the GG-1s made famous.
So the trains still roll on the Pennsy's rails, around its curve and under its rivers. But the company itself lives on in its paper. Frame a bond with Penn Station on it, or a certificate with Horseshoe Curve, and you're hanging up a piece of the Standard Railroad of the World.
❓ Quick answers
When was the Pennsylvania Railroad founded? It was incorporated on April 13, 1846, the date printed on its stock certificates.
Where is Horseshoe Curve? About five miles west of Altoona, Pennsylvania. It opened February 15, 1854 and is a National Historic Landmark.
When was the old Penn Station torn down? Demolition began October 28, 1963 and was finished in 1966.
Why don't later railroad bonds say "gold"? A joint resolution of Congress on June 5, 1933 voided gold-payment clauses, so bonds issued after it promised payment in whatever was legal tender.
