This image of a worker at the Pennsylvania Railroad's car shops at Huntingdon, Pennsylvania was taken 106 years ago this week, on March 3, 1919. The woman in this image is using a lathe to machine a railroad car wheel and axle.
The Pennsylvania Railroad was chartered in 1846 to complete an all-railroad network across the state. In 1857, the Pennsylvania Railroad purchased the old Main Line system and eventually brought the entire line from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh under one management. Between 1855 and 1874, the company underwent rapid expansion and emerged as one of the two largest railroad systems in the region east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. By the time this image was captured, the Pennsylvania Railroad had become the largest railroad in the United States in terms of corporate assets and traffic.
This image is from Hagley Library's collection of Pennsylvania Railroad negatives (Accession 1993.300), which contains more than 5,200 negatives from the Pennsylvania Railroad's corporate files. These negatives largely depict the company's trains, tracks, equipment, and facilities, although the collection also contains numerous views of facilities and equipment on other railroads, of nearby buildings and properties, or of standardized equipment and accessories that were collected by the company for reference.
The negatives in this digital collection were digitized to positives to facilitate access, and have been made available in our Digital Archives. Click here to take a look!
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