WWII Target: Altoona

Posted by on Jun 8, 2020 in | Comments Off on WWII Target: Altoona The tale of the bold but fizzled 1942 Nazi plot to sabotage the Horseshoe Curve railroad landmark near Altoona, Pennsylvania, has been told in books and articles almost since the day the spy-thriller story began to unfold. First came a juvenile-fiction account in 1944 titled The Long Trains Roll by Stephen W. Meader. It recounts the story of Operation Pastorius, a wry allusion to the theme of...
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Grif Teller Paints the Pennsy

Posted by on Nov 27, 2013 in | Comments Off on Grif Teller Paints the Pennsy Grif Teller never drew a Pennsylvania Railroad paycheck, yet today his name is more widely recognized and more closely associated with that monolithic transportation machine than the names of any of the company’s fourteen presidents. From 1928 to 1942 and from 1947 through 1958, Teller cre­ated the distinctive oil paint­ings for the railroad’s annual advertising calendars, which were...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Crossroads of Commerce: The Pennsylvania Railroad Calendar Art of Grif Teller by Dan CupperGreat Eastern Publishing, 1992 (184 pages, cloth, $69.95) From its infancy as a mere sixty-one mile track running through central Pennsylvania’s deep forests and river valleys, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) eventually emerged as a giant of the railroading industry, known throughout the world for...
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Locomotives by Baldwin Locomotive Works

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Locomotives by Baldwin Locomotive Works For many years, railroads – especially the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) – literally moved the nation. Affectionately called the Pennsy, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company was not the first railroad in the United States, but it grew to become the largest and most powerful in the world. In its heyday, the company employed more than one hundred and sixty thousand workers in the Keystone...
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