{"product_id":"antique-1939-pennsylvania-railroad-modern-locomotives-and-cars-booklet","title":"Antique 1939 Pennsylvania Railroad Brochure 🚂 \"Modern Locomotives and Cars\" S-1 Duplex, GG1, Decapod NOS Booklet","description":"\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PyPMjxYCQvQ\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize: 7.5 x 5 inches ~\u003c\/strong\u003e New Old Stock.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🚂 The Locomotive on the Cover Isn't the One You'd Guess\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStaple-bound, thirty-two pages laid out sideways like a little scrapbook, cover reading MODERN LOCOMOTIVES AND CARS 1939 in silvery block letters over a bullet-nosed engine bearing down at the camera, keystone riding high on its nose - that's the booklet in your hands, and it's New Old Stock, meaning it came out of the Pennsylvania Railroad's own 1939 printing and has simply never been used. They vary a little one to the next, but this run has sat quietly since Roosevelt was in his second term.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere's the thing I love pointing out to people: that cover engine isn't the exotic one everybody assumes. It's Class K-4s Streamlined, road number 3768 - the Pennsylvania's standard mainline Pacific, given a smooth Raymond Loewy shroud in February 1936 and a nickname from PRR crews that stuck: \"The Torpedo.\" Open it, and the very first plate inside is the booklet's real experiment, the one-off S-1 duplex, on its own spec page. Easy mix-up - the two locomotives share that same rounded, headlight-in-the-nose look - but 3768 is who's actually staring back at you from the front of this thing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏛️ A Company That Called Itself the Standard of the World\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Pennsylvania Railroad's operations trace back to April 13, 1846, out of Philadelphia. By 1882 - and this isn't advertising copy, it's the historical record - the PRR was the largest railroad on earth by traffic and revenue, and by some measures the largest corporation of any kind, anywhere. In 1916 the company formally adopted the phrase it's remembered for: \"The Standard Railroad of the World.\" This booklet was printed near the tail end of that reign, a little over two decades before the PRR merged with the New York Central on February 1, 1968, to form Penn Central.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe booklet doesn't undersell any of it. Turn to the closing spread and the railroad's own copywriters claim \"the largest fleet of air-conditioned trains in the world\" and boast that 40% of all electrified standard-railroad trackage in the United States belonged to the Pennsylvania. On January 1, 1939 - the date this booklet is reporting from - the company's roster stood at 4,753 locomotives, 6,499 passenger cars (not even counting the Pullmans), and 238,101 freight cars. Read that next to a company that still folded itself into a 7.5 x 5 inch pamphlet, and you get a sense of how much confidence one little booklet was carrying.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🎡 1939 and the Fair\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis was the year the New York World's Fair opened at Flushing Meadows under the theme \"The World of Tomorrow\" - and the Pennsylvania Railroad had real hardware on the fairgrounds to back its slogans up. Engine 3768, the very locomotive photographed on this booklet's cover, stood among the Pennsylvania's showpieces at the fair's railroad exhibit. So did the railroad's brand-new S-1 duplex, no. 6100, fresh out of the Altoona shops on January 31, 1939 - it arrived at the fairgrounds that March, repainted \"American Railroads\" for the occasion, and spent the fair running continuously on a roller platform at 60 miles an hour so visitors could watch its wheels turn without it ever leaving the building. Raymond Loewy, who shaped its shroud from a clay model tested in a wind tunnel, remembered watching it differently: \"I stood on the platform and saw it coming from the distance at 120 miles per hour.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTurn to the inside front cover of this booklet and you'll find a third fair veteran, tucked into a spread called \"Locomotives and Cars of Early Days\": the John Bull, the 1831 locomotive that was the first ever to run on any line that eventually became part of the Pennsylvania System. Robert Stephenson and Company built it in England; a Camden and Amboy Railroad engineer named Isaac Dripps put it together on this side of the Atlantic. The genuine article was on display at that same 1939 fair, more than a century after it first ran - and by 1981 it was steaming again under its own power as the oldest operable locomotive in the world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🔧 Nine Locomotives, Nine Jobs\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Modern Locomotives\" is not a figure of speech here - every page inside is a full broadside photograph paired with a real specification block.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe S-1 duplex gets the star treatment: four 22-inch cylinders instead of the usual two, each pair driving its own set of 84-inch wheels, 300 pounds of boiler pressure, and a working weight with tender over a million pounds. The booklet's own text doesn't hedge: \"capable of sustained speeds of more than 100 miles an hour.\" It wasn't boasting - the S-1 was independently clocked at 100.97 mph in December 1940. But that same size and rigid frame kept it off most of the PRR's curvier track, so 6100 spent its career on the flat run between Chicago and Crestline, Ohio, earned the nickname \"The Big Engine,\" made its last trip May 5, 1946, and was scrapped in 1949. Only one was ever built.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBeside it sit the two engines that actually kept freight moving: the Class M-1a Mountain type, a dual-purpose 4-8-2 that spent most of its life on heavy, high-speed freight rather than the passenger runs it was designed for, and the Class I-1s Decapod, a 2-10-0 with ten driving wheels and 90,000 pounds of tractive effort. PRR crews nicknamed the I-1s the \"Hippo\" for its fat, free-steaming boiler, and it earned the name honestly - 598 of them were built, and they hauled the bulk of the railroad's freight until World War II.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTurn the page and you're into the lighter passenger power: the Class E-6s Atlantic, a 4-4-2 that's famous among railroad historians for one afternoon in particular - June 11, 1927, when engine no. 460 pulled a train carrying a darkroom for developing newsreel film of Charles Lindbergh's welcome-home celebrations, racing a chartered airplane from Washington to New York. Sources disagree on exactly how fast the E-6s ran that day, but they agree on the ending: the train's film was in theaters before the airplane's was. Beside it, the Class G-5s Ten-Wheeler, a 4-6-0 built for local and commuter runs, sharing the E-6s' boiler on smaller drivers - 121 of them, PRR's standard commuter engine for two decades.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen the K-4s page: an unshrouded Class K-4s Pacific, no. 5495, beside the streamlined 3768 you already met on the cover. The K-4s was the Pennsylvania's primary mainline passenger locomotive for over forty years - 425 were built - and two of its surviving sisters, engines 1361 and 3750, were later named Pennsylvania's official state steam locomotives (the cover engine, 3768, is not one of them, though it wore the same Loewy shroud).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLast are the two freight haulers: the Class H-10s Consolidation, no. 9915, which the booklet's own caption describes plainly as \"largely used in local freight and branch line service,\" and the Class L-1s Mikado, no. 952, which shared its boiler with the K-4s and somewhere along the way picked up the nickname \"Lollipops\" - one of those shop names that outlived any explanation of it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🚋 And the Cars the Title Promises\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe back half of \"Modern Locomotives and Cars\" earns its title. A spread of freight and passenger equipment rides alongside the locomotives: a boxcar, a hopper, a passenger coach, a mail car lettered UNITED STATES MAIL \/ RAILWAY POST OFFICE, express cars lettered RAILWAY EXPRESS AGENCY (the consortium of 69 railroads that ran the country's parcel network from 1929 until it went bankrupt in 1975), a double-deck coach lettered LONG ISLAND, and a cabin car marked PITTSBURGH DIVISION.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe one I always point out is horse express car no. 5863, lettered DEL MAR TURF CLUB. Del Mar's racetrack, up the coast from San Diego, was founded by Bing Crosby and William A. Quigley and opened its gates on July 3, 1937 - \"Where the Turf Meets the Surf\" was the slogan from day one. The following August it hosted the Seabiscuit-Ligaroti match race, the first thoroughbred race ever broadcast coast to coast on NBC radio. A Pennsylvania horse car lettered for a California racetrack - I love that.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e⚡ The Electric Future, Under Construction\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne full-page photograph shows a shed full of GG-1 electric locomotive shells under construction, their bodies smooth and unbroken - no rivet heads anywhere. That's Raymond Loewy's doing too: the first GG-1, no. 4800, had a riveted body and earned itself the nickname \"Old Rivets\" from PRR crews once Loewy talked the railroad into switching every locomotive after it to a smooth welded shell, dressed in five gold pinstripes. Built between 1934 and 1943 by General Electric and the PRR's own Altoona shops, roughly 140 GG-1s eventually ran the railroad's electrified lines between New York, Washington, and Harrisburg - the last of them wasn't retired until 1983, by New Jersey Transit. The back cover of this booklet carries one of them in service: no. 4863, a Westinghouse-built engine that entered service in January 1938 and ran for the Pennsylvania until its retirement in December 1977.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🗺️ A Map Signed by Rand McNally\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe inside back cover folds out into a full system map of the Pennsylvania Railroad, credited in small print to \"RAND McNALLY \u0026amp; CO., N.Y.\" - the company's New York office, not its Chicago headquarters. Rand McNally got its start printing railroad tickets and timetables: William Rand opened a Chicago print shop in 1856, hired an Irish immigrant named Andrew McNally two years later, and in 1868 the two of them, along with Rand's nephew George Amos Poole, formally founded Rand McNally \u0026amp; Co. Their first actual map didn't appear until the December 1872 Railroad Guide - meaning by the time they signed this PRR system map, mapmaking had been their business for more than sixty years.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏭 Built in Altoona\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Altoona\" appears on that map, and it's not a small town by accident of geography - it's where nearly every locomotive in this booklet either came from or passed through. Construction on the Pennsylvania's Altoona Works began in 1850, and by the 1920s it had grown into 125 buildings spread across 218 acres, employing more than 16,000 people. Between 1866 and 1946, Altoona built 6,783 steam, diesel, and electric locomotives - for years, it was the largest railroad shop complex anywhere in the world. Not every engine in this booklet came off Altoona's own floor - Baldwin and Lima built plenty under contract - but Altoona is where the Pennsylvania's own engineering ambitions, the S-1 included, got tested against reality.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e📬 Why I Held On to This One\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe booklet closes with its own stated purpose, printed plainly on the page: \"It is hoped, therefore, that this booklet will be of interest to those who wish to know something more about present Pennsylvania Railroad equipment.\" Eighty-some years later, it still does exactly that - a company at the absolute peak of its confidence, in its own words, on paper that's never been used. 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