Vintage 1950s–1960s Pennsylvania Railroad Company Stock Certificate 🚂 Horseshoe Curve Orange

Why Did Nazi Saboteurs Target Horseshoe Curve? 🚂 A Vintage 1950s-1960s Pennsylvania Railroad Stock Certificate, Orange, Horseshoe Curve

Size: 12" x 8"

A real, issued stock certificate of The Pennsylvania Railroad Company, engraved by the American Bank Note Company in orange: the Horseshoe Curve in the oval at the top under the PRR keystone, flanked by two classical figures with locomotive wheels. It reads INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA APRIL 13, 1846, CERTIFICATE FOR LESS THAN 100 SHARES, par value $10 a share, transferable in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago or London, with Irving Trust Company of New York as registrar. They were cancelled when the shares changed hands, so each carries punch holes and the transfer form on the back.

🛤️ Horseshoe Curve

The picture on top is the most famous piece of track in America. The Pennsy opened Horseshoe Curve on February 15, 1854, about five miles west of Altoona, to get its trains up the Allegheny Front without the old Portage Railroad's inclined planes: the line bends 220 degrees around a mountain valley, about 2,375 feet long and 1,300 feet across, and it's a National Historic Landmark today. Local legend holds that Irish immigrant crews cut the roadbed out of the mountainside with little more than picks, shovels and mule carts.

It mattered so much that Hitler's saboteurs came for it. In Operation Pastorius, German agents landed from a U-boat at Amagansett, Long Island, on the night of June 12, 1942, with a list of targets that included Horseshoe Curve and the Pennsylvania Railroad shops at Altoona. Their leader, George Dasch, turned himself in to the FBI before anything happened, but the scare tightened security on the Curve for the rest of the war, and old-timers say it was watched around the clock. One Curve maintenance man's son remembered his father calling the whole plan a dumb idea - the railroad could just reroute over the nearby Mule Shoe.

🏛️ The Standard Railroad of the World

The Pennsylvania Railroad was chartered on April 13, 1846, and grew into the biggest railroad in the country - it called itself the Standard Railroad of the World, and it's one of the four railroads on the Monopoly board. Altoona was its shop town - the Altoona Works grew into one of the largest railroad shop complexes in the world, building and repairing the Pennsy's locomotives - and old-timers there still talk about a place whose paychecks and whistles all ran on the railroad. In Philadelphia it had Broad Street Station, and in New York, Pennsylvania Station, opened in 1910 - the Penn Station concourse photo at the end of my pictures is there for history only and isn't included. The great station was torn down starting in 1963, and the outcry helped launch the preservation movement. In 1968 the Pennsy merged with its old rival the New York Central into Penn Central, which went bankrupt in 1970, and the Curve passed on to Conrail and then Norfolk Southern; freight and Amtrak's Pennsylvanian still swing around it every day.

📅 How old are they?

The $10 par value marks this as the Horseshoe Curve design that followed the PRR's older $50 state-seal certificates, and dated copies of this orange design run from the late 1950s through the 1960s. The one you get will have its own date, number, owner and share count, and may look a little different from the one in my pictures.

🚂 About these certificates

They're 12 by 8 inches, engraved on heavy certificate paper, with the cancellation punches that come with having been used. It's a great one for a train room, an office, a Monopoly fan, anybody from Altoona, or a grandkid who loves trains. The supply is finite - the Pennsylvania Railroad has been gone since 1968, nobody's issuing its stock again, and once these last ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.