The Pennsylvania Railroad shops at Altoona

One repair shop, 1850

Altoona exists because the Pennsylvania Railroad wanted its main shops at the foot of the Allegheny Front. The founding page covers that decision. This page follows what the shops became.

The company built its first repair facility in Altoona in 1850, the year its line from Harrisburg reached the valley. That fact, and most of the figures below, come from the background essay for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) marker titled "Pennsylvania Railroad Shops", dedicated in 1996. The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) report on the city, held by the Library of Congress, fills in the physical growth of the complex.

Growth was quick. By 1855 the Altoona shops employed about 1,000 people, who repaired and built railway cars and made iron track and parts for locomotives and bridges. By 1875 the complex, as the PHMC essay lists it, held three engine houses, an iron and brass foundry, machine shops, a boiler shop, paint shops, blacksmith shops, a coaling platform, freight-car and passenger-car shops, a planing mill, a tin and cabinet shop, an upholstery shop, storehouses, a fire-engine house and a lumber drier. It was, in effect, a self-contained industrial town inside the town.

Spreading along the valley

The original shop site ran from 12th to 15th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. HABS reports that by 1869, after the extra demand of the Civil War years, it was crowded with buildings, tracks and equipment. The company bought more land in the Logantown section to the northeast and built car construction and repair shops there, which became known as the "Lower Shops". The locomotive department took over the whole of the original site and began to build locomotives as well as repair them.

Further growth went north and south along the valley floor:

• Juniata. Planning for new shops north of the Lower Shops began in 1886, and the first Juniata shops for building and repairing locomotives were finished in 1890. By 1916, HABS says, the Juniata complex stretched about two miles. The village beside it boomed with the arrival of skilled mechanics and was chartered as a borough in 1893.
• South Altoona. In 1903 the company bought eighty-five acres in South Altoona and built a foundry complex to cast iron parts for locomotives and cars. At full production, according to HABS, the foundry made 900 wheels a day. An oil mixing and testing plant built alongside supplied petroleum products to the entire railroad system.
• East Altoona. The East Altoona roundhouse, built in 1904, measured 395 feet across and serviced about 300 locomotives a day for the railroad's Middle and Pittsburgh divisions, the PHMC essay says.

By the early 1900s the PHMC essay counts 242 acres and 122 buildings in four complexes: the Altoona Machine Shops, the Altoona Car Shops, the Juniata Shops and the South Altoona Foundries.

What the shops built

Many American railroads bought all their locomotives from outside builders. The Pennsylvania bought thousands too, from the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia and others, but it also built its own in large numbers. Between 1866 and 1946 Altoona turned out 6,873 locomotives, most of them steam engines. The shops also built tens of thousands of freight and passenger cars and maintained and repaired the company's fleet. HABS records that the last locomotive was built in Altoona in 1946.

One Altoona-built engine is still on public view. The PHMC essay for the "Altoona" marker notes that in 1957 the company placed a retired K4-class passenger locomotive, No. 1361, on display in the park at Horseshoe Curve.

The shops in figures

The two peak figures differ because they count slightly different things in slightly different years; both sources agree that employment topped out in the 1920s at well over ten thousand.

The people who worked there

Shop work needed an unusually high share of skilled trades. HABS lists blacksmiths, boilermakers, car builders, carpenters, machinists, pattern makers and upholsterers among them, and notes that the railroad sometimes sent agents to Europe to recruit skilled workers. The PHMC essay describes immigrants from across Europe moving to Altoona for steady, comparatively well-paid work and settling in neighbourhoods with others from their own countries. In the shops, it says, English, Welsh, Scottish and German workers held most supervisory jobs, while Italian and Eastern European workers were mostly limited to labouring work.

Many shop families owned their homes. HABS links this to the city's building and loan associations, member-run funds that lent savings to members to build or buy houses. It counts thirty-seven such associations in Altoona by 1900, compared with eight in Johnstown, a city of similar size, and forty-four by 1925. The PHMC essay draws the same connection and adds a consequence: workers who owned houses were less likely to leave town.

Thousands more people worked for the railroad outside the shops, on train crews, in dispatching, in the engine houses and freight yards, and on track and signal gangs. The PHMC essay estimates that Altoona's population more than doubled between 1900 and 1930, from about 39,000 to about 82,000.

Strikes and company unions

With so much of the city working for one employer, labour conflict was rarer than in other railroad towns, and both sources explain why. During the national railroad strike of 1877, HABS reports, the governor sent militia companies to Altoona, and strikers took control of the shop complex, letting passenger trains through while stopping freight; the PHMC essay sums up the result as work disrupted but not stopped.

Afterwards the company set up company unions with labour-management councils and kept out the independent unions. In 1911 and again in 1922, when strikes elsewhere threatened to spread, it made clear that trouble in Altoona could lead it to move the shops. During the national shopmen's strike of 1922 the Altoona shops were barely affected, because, the PHMC essay says, workers knew the city offered almost no other jobs. Independent unions won the legal right to organise only in the 1930s, when New Deal laws outlawed company unions.

Diesel and decline

The shops began to shrink in the Depression. HABS gives the payroll as nearly $21 million in 1928, $8.3 million in 1932 and $6.4 million in 1938. The bigger blow came after the Second World War, when diesel locomotives replaced steam. HABS cites an estimate that a diesel needed only about a tenth of the maintenance of a steam engine, and the need for such large shops disappeared. The company closed one shop after another.

Car work moved down the valley to Hollidaysburg in the mid-1950s: the PHMC essay dates a new freight-car shop there to 1955, and HABS dates the move of car construction to 1956. The remaining Altoona facilities passed to Conrail in 1976, and in 1999 Norfolk Southern acquired 60 percent of the Conrail system, including the Altoona shops. When the PHMC essay was written, the shops employed about a thousand people, roughly the number of 1855.

That arc, from one repair shop to the largest concentration of railroad shops in the country and back to a single large employer among many, is the main thread of Altoona's history. The civic history page shows the same arc in the census.

The story continues: Horseshoe Curve: how the railroad climbed the mountain