Altoona, still a railroad town

Altoona has been an important railroad town since it was founded by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1849. Even the RV park had a railroad theme.

A major tourist attraction is Horseshoe Curve. Completed in 1854, rail fans have been visiting it ever since. The curve is a tight arc of approximately 220 degrees with a radius tightening to nearly 600 feet. It is still a major east-west rail line, now owned by Norfolk Southern Railway.

The curve was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1966. There is a park, visitors center and a small funicular railway to save climbing the hundreds of steps up from the parking lot.

Later we went to the Railroaders Memorial Museum in downtown Altoona. Located in the former Master Mechanics Building of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Altoona Works. The Altoona Works were once the largest railroad shop complex in the world. A total of 6,783 steam, diesel and electric locomotives were manufactured in Altoona between 1866 and 1946

The museum is unique in that it focuses on the railroaders, not the equipment. Exhibits demonstrate life in Altoona and “working on the railroad.”

The next day we went west of Horseshoe Curve, where the old Pennsylvania Railroad main line crosses the summit of the Allegany Mountains through a set a tunnels.

These tunnels have long been a popular train watching spot.

The Allegheny Tunnel, the original 1854 bore, was rebuilt in 1993 to provide clearance for “double-stack” container trains.

The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania

The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg has a fine collection of equipment representing the railroad history of the state.

Glenn in a Conrail GP30, built in 1963.

In addition to locomotives, there were old cars including this Fruit Growers Express “reefer,” built in 1928 to haul fruit and vegetables from Florida to northeastern cities. This full-size exhibit shows the back-breaking work of filling the bunkers with ice.

Reading Terminal Market

We had breakfast at the Down Home Diner in the Reading Terminal Market. The Reading Terminal was built by the Reading Railroad (one of the four “Monopoly Railroads”) and opened in 1893. It was built on the site of a open air market that had been in continuous operation since 1653. There was a tremendous outcry over the plans to build the train station on the site. To mitigate criticism, the railroad agreed to raise the trainshed and all the tracks one story above street level and to place the market underneath. Even during renovation of the trainshed into the Philadelphia Convention Center in the 1990s, the market remained open.