“The Greatest Highway to the West”: Photographer William H. Rau Documents the Pennsylvania Railroad

It is perfectly safe in saying the amateur, and even the professional, will have much to learn from the results of this photo­graphic expedition, fitted out some months ago by the Pennsylvania Railroad with as much care and almost the expense of an Arctic one, and which is still in the field of exploration, daily sending in remarkable illustrations of choice picture finds and showing that which...
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Currents

Railroading with Rau The Pennsylvania Railroad Company (PRR) was not yet a half-century old when it commissioned William H. Rau (1855-1920) to tackle the enormous task of photographically documenting its extensive rail lines. So extraordinarily successful was the Pennsy that by the time Rau commenced his work in 1891, the railroad was the largest corporation in the country and claimed more than...
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Bookshelf

Traveling the Pennsylvania Railroad: The Photographs of William H. Rau Edited by John C. Van Home, with Eileen E. Drelick Univer­sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 (272 pages, cloth, $49.95) In 1891 and again in 1893, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company (PRR) – known to generations by its sobriquet, “the Pennsy” – commissioned William Herman Rau (1855-1920), a well known...
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