{"product_id":"vintage-1945-pennsylvania-railroad-pennsy-bond-certificate-with-coupons","title":"Vintage 1945 Pennsylvania Railroad Bond 🚂 Pennsy General Mortgage Series F, Penn Station Vignette, with Coupons","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\/EhciUu5GI6w\" 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: 15 x 10 inches ~\u003c\/strong\u003e They vary a little one to the next.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eA $1,000 Promise from the Pennsylvania Railroad 🚂\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eI've handled a lot of old paper over the years, and a railroad bond still stops me every time — thick engraved stock, deep blue guilloché borders, and a little steel-engraved cityscape sitting across the top like a postage stamp blown up to poster size. Before there were interstate exit signs and airport terminals, the Pennsylvania Railroad was simply \"the Pennsy\" to everyone who worked it, rode it, or lent it money, and this is a piece of how it borrowed that money.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a $1,000 General Mortgage 3⅛% Bond, Series F, issued by The Pennsylvania Railroad Company, with principal and interest payable at the railroad's own office in Philadelphia or its agency in Manhattan. It carries the engraved facsimile signature of the company's Treasurer \"as of the first day of January, 1945,\" a stated maturity of January 1, 1985 — a full forty-year term — and a large PENNA R.R. CO. tint running across the face in two horizontal lines. The interest coupons ride along on their own sheet. Series F was sold as coupon bonds, payable to the bearer and registerable as to principal, and the fully registered form came in $1,000, $5,000 and larger pieces that could be swapped for these.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🎟️ How the Rate Got Set: An Auction, Not a Handshake\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe 3⅛% printed on this bond wasn't picked by the Pennsylvania Railroad at all — it was named by the winning bidder. The railroad put $51,782,000 of Series F bonds out for competitive bids due by noon, Eastern War Time, on January 9, 1945, and left the rate itself open, any eighth of a percent up to 3½%. A group led by Kuhn, Loeb \u0026amp; Co. won with a bid of 100.609 and chose 3⅛%; they turned around and resold the bonds to the public that same day at 101.68. Two other bidders, Halsey, Stuart \u0026amp; Co. and the Equitable Life Assurance Society, both asked for 3¼% and lost. It was one of the Pennsy's first bond sales run this way — the Interstate Commerce Commission had only ordered competitive bidding on big railroad issues eight months earlier, in May 1944, after Robert R. Young and Cyrus Eaton campaigned against what they called a banker's monopoly on the business. The Pennsylvania Railroad's longtime banker, Kuhn, Loeb, won anyway. The money raised paid off $60 million of the railroad's 4½% debentures from 1930, redeemed April 1, 1945.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt's a wartime rate, not a postwar one. This bond was sold while the war in Europe was still being fought, in the years the Federal Reserve held long U.S. Treasury bonds under a wartime ceiling of 2½%.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏛️ The Vignette: Pennsylvania Station Before It Vanished\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe building engraved across the top is Pennsylvania Station in New York — a long Doric colonnade with a church spire just visible behind it at left, just what you'd expect along Seventh Avenue. Designed by McKim, Mead \u0026amp; White, the station opened to Long Island Rail Road trains on September 8, 1910 and to Pennsylvania Railroad trains that November, modeled in part on the Roman Baths of Caracalla, Diocletian and Titus — pink granite on the outside, pale Italian travertine lining the great waiting room within, a Doric colonnade the length of the Seventh Avenue front, and a glass-and-steel concourse, in a station that held the largest indoor space in New York City. It existed for a specific engineering reason: the Pennsylvania Railroad had tunneled under both the Hudson and East Rivers so its trains could run straight into Manhattan instead of stopping across the river in New Jersey and ferrying passengers over.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe railroad's president Alexander Cassatt — brother of the painter Mary Cassatt — pushed the tunnel project through, but he never saw the station open. He died in December 1906, and it was James McCrea, president after him, who was running the railroad when the doors finally opened in 1910.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe station stood barely fifty years. Losing money and needing cash, the Pennsylvania Railroad sold the air rights above it in the early 1960s, and demolition of the aboveground structure began in October 1963, to make way for Madison Square Garden and an office tower, while the tracks and platforms below kept right on working. It's still one of the great losses in American architectural history — the architectural historian Vincent Scully put it in words that get quoted to this day: \"One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.\" The public outcry is credited with helping bring about New York City's Landmarks Preservation Law in 1965, the same law that saved Grand Central Terminal when the Supreme Court upheld it in 1978. The old station isn't gone without a trace, either — its underground platforms and tracks are still in daily use, and since 2021 Moynihan Train Hall, built inside the old Farley Post Office across the street, has tried to give travelers back a little of that grandeur.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🛤️ The Pennsylvania Railroad, Mile by Mile\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eChartered by the Pennsylvania legislature on April 13, 1846, the railroad was born out of plain civic worry — Philadelphia's merchants watched the Baltimore \u0026amp; Ohio creeping toward Pittsburgh and feared Baltimore would walk off with their trade. Samuel Vaughan Merrick took over as the company's first president in 1847, and under J. Edgar Thomson, its chief engineer and then its president from 1852, the line pushed west through the Alleghenies. By 1854 the route from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh was finished, and in 1857 the Pennsylvania Railroad bought the old state-owned Main Line of Public Works, giving it a through route from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh under one roof. Chicago came later — the railroad didn't reach it until it leased the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne \u0026amp; Chicago in 1869.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBy 1882 it was being called the largest railroad, and the largest corporation of any kind, in the world, judged by revenue. It flew a plain keystone as its emblem — a nod to Pennsylvania's own nickname, the Keystone State — and by 1916 had adopted the slogan that stuck to it for the next half-century: \"The Standard Railroad of the World.\" Old-timers along the line will tell you it earned that swagger. Its flagship train, the Broadway Limited, ran New York to Chicago in direct competition with the New York Central's 20th Century Limited.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e⚔️ Steel Rails at War\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis bond is dated January 1945, with the war still months from over, and the Pennsylvania Railroad's tracks were carrying a volume of troop trains, tank cars and freight that's hard to picture today. Even after the surrender the load kept coming: in one week that September, bringing the boys home, the railroad moved 141,000 servicemen in 227 trains. The line's importance wasn't lost on the enemy, either: Horseshoe Curve, the railroad's famous engineering feat near Altoona, was on the target list of Operation Pastorius, a 1942 German sabotage plan in which agents landed by U-boat on the East Coast. They were caught before they touched a single rail, but it says something about how much the Pennsy's lines mattered to the war effort that German planners thought Horseshoe Curve was worth the risk.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏦 Girard Trust and the Mortgage Behind the Bond\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eGirard Trust Company, named on the certificate as trustee, wasn't founded by Stephen Girard himself — he died in 1831, and it was Philadelphia businessmen eager to trade on his name and reputation who started the company after his death, in 1836. Girard had made his fortune as a merchant and banker and personally underwrote as much as 95 percent of the U.S. government's War of 1812 loan; his estate later endowed Girard College. The trust company that took his name built a domed, Pantheon-styled headquarters on Broad Street, opened in 1908 — the idea of its president at the time, Effingham B. Morris — and it's a Ritz-Carlton hotel today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe two companies were closer than \"trustee and client.\" Morris was also a senior director of the Pennsylvania Railroad until 1937, and a later Girard Trust president, James E. Gowen, joined the railroad's board in 1942 — so when this Series F bond was issued in January 1945, the trustee bank's own president sat on the railroad's board.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe mortgage itself is dated June 1, 1915, and this Series F bond is one of six lettered series — A through F — issued under it over thirty years, with supplements added in 1934, 1936 and January 1945. The first bonds under that 1915 mortgage, $65 million of them, went on sale in May 1915, and by the company's own history, the sinking of the Lusitania was announced the day after that sale. When Kuhn, Loeb \u0026amp; Co. paid the railroad for that first issue on June 1, 1915, they wrote a single check for $65 million — the largest check anyone in the country had written up to that time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e✒️ The Man Whose Signature Is on This Bond\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe facsimile signature stamped \"as of the first day of January, 1945\" belongs to Howard W. Schotter, the railroad's Treasurer from 1940 to 1947. Schotter had another claim to fame at the company: back in 1927, as Assistant Treasurer, he wrote the Pennsylvania Railroad's own corporate history, a book of more than five hundred pages, researched and written, in his own words, largely in his spare hours. The man who signed off on this bond is the same one who told the story of the company that issued it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🖋️ American Bank Note Company\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe certificate was engraved and printed by the American Bank Note Company. Its roots reach back to 1795, and the company itself was formed in an 1858 merger of several security printers, going on to engrave currency, postage stamps, and stock and bond certificates for governments and corporations across the country. The fine cross-hatched lettering and the raised, tactile texture of the vignette come from intaglio engraving — a technique that goes back to the 1400s in printmaking generally, which security printers like American Bank Note adopted because its fine detail was so hard for a counterfeiter to copy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🛤️ From Empire to Bankruptcy: What Became of the Pennsy\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis bond was written for a forty-year term, but the company that issued it didn't make it that far under its own name. In 1968 the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with its old rival, the New York Central, to form what everyone called Penn Central, and it went bad almost at once. Penn Central collapsed into bankruptcy on June 21, 1970, the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history at the time, and its passenger and freight operations were eventually split off into Amtrak in 1971 and Conrail in 1976. The Pennsylvania Railroad name — the keystone, the Broadway Limited, \"the Standard Railroad of the World\" — was gone from the rails twenty-three years after this bond was signed, which is a good part of why paper like this still carries some weight for the people who keep it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/very-rare-1934-pennsylvania-railroad-pennsy-gold-bond-certificate-w\"\u003eVintage 1934 Pennsylvania Railroad 1000 Bond 📜 Series E, Coupon Sheet, Penn Station Vignette, American Bank Note Co\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-1913-new-york-central-railroad-1000-gold-bond-grand-central\"\u003eAntique 1913 New York Central Railroad $1,000 Bond 🚂 Payable in Gold Coin, 4.5% Refunding \u0026amp; Improvement Mortgage, Grand Central Terminal\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-1950s-pennsylvania-railroad-pennsy-stock-certificate-green-usa\"\u003eVintage 1900s 1950s Pennsylvania Railroad Stock Certificate Pennsy Green Monopoly Icon Engraved Scripophily 📜\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46628504928488,"sku":"VAG-8931987914984","price":13.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/il_fullxfull.6202744558_pfdw.jpg?v=1785441562","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-1945-pennsylvania-railroad-pennsy-bond-certificate-with-coupons","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}