We've got a full house this #TrainTuesday - this black and white negative from November 2, 1938 shows fifty-eight employees of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, posed in front of the steam engine boiler for "The Big Engine", an experimental S1 class steam locomotive. At the time it was built, the duplex locomotive was the longest and heaviest rigid frame reciprocating steam locomotive ever created.
This item is part of Hagley Library's Pennsylvania Railroad negative collection (Accession 1993.300).
Incorporated in 1846, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company became the largest railroad in the United States in terms of corporate assets and traffic from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Our Pennsylvania Railroad negative collection consists of more than 5,200 negatives from the official Pennsylvania Railroad files, mostly documenting Pennsylvania Railroad trains, tracks, equipment, and facilities.
The collection also contains numerous views of similar facilities and equipment on other railroads, of nearby buildings and properties, or of standardized equipment and accessories that were collected by the Pennsylvania Railroad for reference.
These negatives were digitized to positives for online access. Many of the digital images are black-and-white, low resolution copies produced from the original negatives. To view this collection online now, click here to visit its page in our Digital Archive.