Pennsylvania Railroad:
No metropolis is extra synonymous with the Pennsylvania Railroad than Altoona. Situated on the base of Brush Mountain, in Logan and Nice valleys, it’s the state’s tenth most-populous one after Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Erie, Studying, Scranton, Bethlehem, Lancaster, and Harrisburg. However it was that very mountain which first inhibited, after which sparked, its development.
Blanketed by hard-wood forests and traversed by the backbone of the Appalachian Mountain range-which stretches from Newfoundland to Alabama and serves because the Japanese Continental Divide-Pennsylvania posed an impediment to each westward inhabitants growth and commerce with its personal Allegheny ridge part of them thrust as excessive as 4,000 ft towards the sky. Trans-state journey, by rudimentary tracks and trails left by wild animals and Native People, over the imposing peaks, required three weeks to complete-under the perfect of circumstances.
British colonists, etching out a couple of clearings for farms within the 18th century, constituted the realm’s first fashionable settlers, whereas early industrialists harnessed its minerals via coal and iron furnaces. But their merchandise may solely be transported by wagons to Pittsburgh, thought of the gateway to the west, over these crude trails.
The primary remedial effort to ease this transportation barrier was made in 1823 when John Stevens was granted a state constitution to assemble a dual-section railroad, the primary from Philadelphia to Columbia and the second from Columbia to Pittsburgh. However the idealized, east-west rail hyperlink evaporated with its promised capital.
New impetus for the connection, nevertheless, occurred when commerce, hitherto brisk in Philadelphia, was siphoned off to the Erie Canal route, accomplished in 1825, and legislature, making an attempt to reverse its results, approved development of a state-owned Predominant Line Canal linking Philadelphia with Pittsburgh for the primary time by way of the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Opening on March 18, 1834, it employed an inter-modal system by which canal boats would ply waterways to the Hollidaysburg Canal Basin within the east earlier than being transferred on to flatbed rail vehicles after which transported throughout the 36.65-mile Allegheny Ridge part, pulled by cables and stationary steam engines. Refloated within the Johnstown Canal Basin within the west, they’d then full their journey to Pittsburgh by way of water.
Though it decreased the trans-Pennsylvania journey to 4 days over the rudimentary, trail-plied Conestoga wagon methodology, the system was nonetheless less-than-optimal, arduous to barter, and subjected to the occasional mishap. What was wanted was a single-mode, continuous-track hyperlink, the impediment to which, after all, was the mountainous terrain.
Its spark, as soon as once more, was lit by competitors. Certainly, destined already for Pittsburgh, at the very least in development type, was monitor for use by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, stretching 178 miles from Cumberland, Maryland, and approaching it from the southeast.
Fearing a second loss to its profitable commerce with the west, Philadelphia advocated a Pennsylvania-indigenous lifeline throughout the state within the type of a fast, environment friendly, single-mode rail hyperlink. Surprisingly, the Pennsylvania State Meeting, concurring with the necessity, approved each the extension of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s monitor to Pittsburgh and the constitution of a state-reflective line named the “Pennsylvania Railroad,” which was to assemble a 249-mile extension of the prevailing Philadelphia-Harrisburg monitor, consequently competing with the Predominant Line Canal and Allegheny Portage Railroad interchange system.
First motion of the indigenous, intra-state line, no additional than an inch, was the one imprinted on paper within the type of Governor Francis R. Skunk’s signature on April 13, 1846, altering imaginative and prescient into legislation, and such overwhelming help had been obtained for the brand new railroad, that the Baltimore and Ohio constitution was revoked the next yr.
Following election of the primary board of administrators, comprised of President Samuel Vaughn Merrick and Chief Engineer John Edgar Thomson, on March 30, 1847, surveys revealed three potential routes, probably the most possible of which was the westerly one from Harrisburg via Logan’s Narrows to Sugar Hole Run after which to Robinson’s Summit (which might later be named “Altoona”), following the Susquehanna and Juniata rivers earlier than gaining 800 ft of elevation over the Allegheny Mountains and terminating in Pittsburgh.
However the Allegheny Portage Railroad may solely surmount the imposing peaks by way of its ten inclined planes. How, then, may the Pennsylvania Railroad accomplish that with out them? And, whereas each have been seen as rivals, in actuality, they initially complemented each other.
The Pennsylvania Railroad’s jap part, consisting of 173 miles of monitor from Lancaster to Duncansville, opened in September of 1850, connecting the next month with the Allegheny Portage system, whereas the western part, from Pittsburgh to Johnstown, was accomplished on December 10, 1852.
The Allegheny Portage, having already walked within the Pennsylvania’s sneakers with its intermediate, and laboriously-slow, mountain vaulting water-and-rail interchange, solely briefly served as its hyperlink, because it tried to design an all-track route.
The issue lay, actually, in laying monitor, which must climb the mountain’s rock face to surmount its 1,216-foot summit via a tunnel with present locomotive functionality, but keep away from the stationary engine-inclined airplane system. The required grade would have been prohibitive.
The answer was an extended, double loop of monitor, which assumed a extra gradual, locomotive-capable elevation acquire, lowering a ten-percent grade (or an increase of ten ft for each 100 ft of distance) to a extra docile 1.8 %.
Touted alongside the north aspect of the valley, the road arced to the left, over a artifical embankment, to Kittanning Level, the place it fashioned, after essential rock wall chiseling, the now-famous, half-mile-long Horseshoe Curve, its gradual rise indicated by its west aspect elevation, which is 122 ft greater than its east.
Declared operational on February 15, 1854, it decreased the four-day journey between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh by the Allegheny Portage Railroad to solely 15 hours by its Pennsylvania counterpart, and triggered a fast passenger and freight loss to it, forcing the dual-mode interchange system to concede defeat.
Though it had employed hybrid know-how of childish growth, it nonetheless succeeded in surmounting the topographical impediment and served as one of many essential steps in man’s technological climb.
Extra importantly, the Horseshoe Curve, symbolic of the triumph of the state’s very Allegheny Mountains to east-west journey, sparked a secondary rise-from the virgin land-of town wanted to keep up it and the railroad which had given start to it. That metropolis was Altoona.
Altoona Store Advanced:
Situated on the foot of the Alleghenies, Altoona sprouted from the 224-acre David Robinson farm whose strategic location, 235 miles west of Philadelphia and 116 miles east of Pittsburgh, was optimum from which to dispatch further locomotive energy to assist the climb over the rising grade. Along side these practice reconfigurations was the necessity for each engine and unpowered rolling inventory upkeep and restore.
The deed of switch, signed on April 24, 1849 after the $10,000 buy worth had been paid, supplied the mandatory land for the primary railroad outlets. As the guts of the Allegheny Mountains, nourished by the realm’s coal, iron, lumber, and water sources, the city pumped life into the realm.
Primarily based upon the unique plans devised in 1849, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Altoona Advanced included a machine store, an engine home, and an erecting store, to which have been added an eight-stall and -track roundhouse and an extended construction housing a locomotive restore store, a foundry, a blacksmith, a machine store, a woodwork store, and a portray store, enabling it to keep up its first, single-track reference to Pittsburgh by way of sections of the New Portage Railroad in 1850. Progressive functionality enabled it to carry out the three main features of automotive manufacturing, locomotive half manufacture, and restore.
However insatiable demand required ever-increasing capability. By 1855, its present services had been expanded and a 26-stall engine home had been constructed.
The town’s personal development paralleled that of the railroad complicated’s, rising from 2,000 in 1854 to three,591 in 860 and eclipsing the ten,000-level a decade later, at which era a full ten % of its inhabitants had been employed by the railroad outlets. That they had intermittently burgeoned right into a mini-metropolis of their very own, with a automotive store, a tin store, a carpenter store, a automotive restore store, a boiler store, a roundhouse, an engine restore store, a paint store, and an iron and brass foundry. Administrative places of work have been positioned all through town.
Acquisition of the Predominant Line of Public Works in 1857 and the closure of the New Portage Railroad solely served to extend rail transport demand, requiring commensurate capability will increase within the Altoona Advanced.
Civil Battle-necessitated demand of rail vehicles to move Union Pressure munitions and troopers additional rendered the Pennsylvania Railroad’s services integral to the hassle, sparking yet one more collection of expansions in 1862.
However the endless demand, exerting its results towards the boundaries of its unique, 1850 Altoona Machine Retailers Advanced, coupled with the rising measurement of locomotives, prompted it to think about a secondary engine manufacturing and restore location. The engines themselves, hitherto weighing underneath 30 tons and constructed up of smaller sections, could possibly be manually moved and assembled with the help of primary blocks, jacks, and swing cranes, however their rising functionality, mirrored by their sheer measurement, required higher clearances and energy cranes to maneuver, neither of which could possibly be accommodated inside the unique compound.
The Consolidation engine, as an example, weighed 48 tons, however was succeeded by the 57.3-ton Class R kind of 1885.
The brand new web site, within the jap part of town, was mirrored by the power’s very name-the Juniata Retailers-which have been constructed between September of 1888 and 1890, and supplied a full array of features: a blacksmith store; a paint store; a boiler store; electrical, hydraulic, and gasoline homes; a paint construction; storerooms; a hydraulic switch desk, and an workplace. A longitudinal meeting line, in a boiler-blacksmith-machine-erecting store configuration, facilitated elevated locomotive manufacturing, which standardly started with the flanging, punching, development, and riveting of its boiler in its applicable store earlier than being moved, in accomplished type, to the erecting location. Frames and forgings, having been transferred from the blacksmith to the machine store, have been now united with the cylinders and castings, positioned on the heart of the constructing, whereas the boiler was joined with its matching components within the erecting store.
Ultimate meeting, progressing from particular person components on the constructing’s west finish to a accomplished unit at its east, often required every week.
Like its Altoona counterpart, the Juniata Advanced expanded in response to the demand exerted on it. Enlarged erecting, blacksmith, machine, and boiler outlets, for instance, have been constructed between 1902 and 1903, and a second blacksmith store and altogether new storehouse have been subsequently added.
On the finish of World Battle I, a second machine store took its place inside the sprawling facility and it was initially used for locomotive tender development and restore.
By 1926, the Juniata Locomotive Store consisted of two blacksmith outlets, a boiler store, two machine outlets, a tank store, and an erecting and machine store, enabling it to restore 4 locomotives per day and produce 12 altogether new ones per thirty days. A hearth, occurring on December 27, 1931 and incapacitating the unique Altoona Advanced, resulted within the switch of all locomotive work to Juniata seven years later.
Two historic occasions elevated exercise to a fever pitch: throughout World Battle I, tanks let loose an unceasing plea for armor plat strengthening, whereas the complicated’s transition from the normal steam engine to the extra superior diesel-electric kind necessitated inner reconfigurations. Due to its elevated reliability, nevertheless, it additionally signaled the discount of personnel by 1957, because it required fewer repairs and overhauls.
The Altoona Works, peeking with 122 buildings and 218 acres of yards spanning three miles, employed 20,000-4,000 of whom labored within the yards and 16,000 of whom have been within the shops-and produced 6,873 locomotives, changing into the world’s largest such railroad store complicated. Altoona’s inhabitants hovered on the 90,000-mark.
As soon as subdivided into 5 places, it carried out locomotive restore and manufacturing within the Altoona Machine Retailers, themselves comprised of 36 departments and working from twelfth to sixteenth streets. The Altoona Automobile Retailers, positioned within the southern portion of town, each constructed and repaired passenger, parlor, sleeping, and mail coaches. The Juniata Retailers fielded the total vary of present locomotive propulsion sorts: steam, electrical, gasoline electrical, and diesel electrical.
At 395 ft in diameter, with a 75-foot turntable, the East Altoona Engine Home, its fourth location, was the world’s largest, that includes 50 stalls. The hub of locomotive servicing, it dealt with between 325 and 350 per day, together with the T-1 Class, the final and largest steam engine inbuilt Altoona after a 110-foot turntable had been put in in 1942. The close by East Altoona Coal Dock, a 135-foot-high concrete construction primarily based by a steel-frame and replenished by 35 day by day hopper vehicles, provided steam engines employed on the Pittsburgh and Center divisions with its 1,250-ton capability.
The South Altoona Foundries, the fifth of the complicated’s services, produced wheels for each locomotives and vehicles.
The post-World Battle II decline in practice journey, sparked by a rise in car reputation, noticed the progressive alternative of the railways with highways, starting a interval of Altoona Store facility and worker retrenchment.
The short-lived merger between the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central, which fashioned Penn Central on February 1, 1968 and initiated a $6.5 million modernization program, simply as rapidly plunged into the tunnel of chapter two years later, on June 21, rising as Conrail after Congress handed the Regional Rail Reorganization Act of 1973 to review the precarious Penn Central state of affairs. The beneficial, and adopted, resolution was the formation of the privately-owned Consolidated Rail Company, or “Conrail,” from similarly-blighted corporations, together with the Penn Central, the Erie Lackawanna, the Central of New Jersey, the LeHigh Valley, the Lehigh and Hudson River, and the Studying railroads, and, within the occasion, it chosen the Juniata Locomotive Retailers as its precept restore facility, of which it assumed managerial management.
After a 1983 modernization program, it was in a position to provide a full menu of manufacturing, restore, overhaul, and upkeep providers of engine governors, alternators, energy assemblies, followers, mills, and blower motors, in addition to manufacture of state-of-the-art EMD and Common Electrical locomotives for BNSF, CSX, and Norfolk Southern, the latter of which in the end acquired Conrail’s Pennsylvania route system and, not directly, its Juniata Store Advanced.
Nonetheless fielding some 60 to 80 day by day trains, together with the easterly and westerly “Pennsylvania” runs to New York and Pittsburgh operated by Amtrak, Altoona, positioned on the foot of the Allegheny entrance and in shut proximity to the Horseshoe Curve, capitalized on its topographical obstacles, making a useful contribution to each the nation’s transportation infrastructure and the Industrial Revolution, via the Pennsylvania Railroad and its store complicated, in an final obstacle-into-opportunity transformation.
An Allegheny Mountain vacationer hub, the “Railroad Metropolis” of Altoona shares its previous with current guests via its Railroaders Memorial Museum and Horseshoe Curve sights.
Railroaders Memorial Museum:
Situated within the 1882 Grasp Mechanics Constructing, previously utilized by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a testing lab, “the Railroaders Memorial Museum,” in accordance with its self-proclaimed function, “is devoted to revealing, deciphering, commemorating, and celebrating the numerous contributions of railroaders and their households to American life and business,” chronicling the historical past of the railroad with out which Altoona wouldn’t have existed.
Sprouting type a seed first planted in 1967, when the Altoona Railway Museum Membership was fashioned, it was formally integrated because the “Railroaders Memorial Museum” 5 years later. Its eventual five-acre parcel of land, as soon as occupied by the Penn Central Railroad Store Advanced and bought by the Altoona Redevelopment Authority to Heart Associates, was acquired in 1993, together with the previous Masters Mechanics facility, and the museum, having already had its grand opening on September 21, 1980, celebrated a second such occasion 18 years later, on April 25, 1998, with these additions.
Coming into the interactive museum’s time portal, which transports the customer again to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Fifties pinnacle-of-operations interval by way of recreated scenes, retailer fronts, interiors, voices, and sounds, he finds himself at a railroad station alive with hissing steam and ear-piercing practice whistles, about to board a full-sized duplicate of a Ok-4 locomotive displaying quantity 1361.
The rationale for the city’s very existence is defined within the “Why within the World Altoona?” exhibit. Pittsburgh wanted a rail reference to the jap a part of the state, it explains, and the fledgling Pennsylvania Railroad fiercely competed with the already-established Baltimore and Ohio for the fitting to construct it. Finally successful, it linked Pittsburgh within the west with its mirror-image metropolis within the east, Philadelphia. However mounting the Alleghenies was an nearly unimaginable climb. A spot of wilderness, chosen by Chief Engineer Thomson, developed into the bottom camp, which supported the feat and was designated “Altoona,” in the end evolving into the railroad capital of the world. Trains have been designed, constructed, examined, and repaired right here. Its individuals would change the face of America and show indispensable in its safety, from the Civil Battle to World Battle II.
Like so many chapters of technological growth, Altoona, its individuals, and the Pennsylvania Railroad performed an vital position in America’s rise as a nation.
Extra perception in regards to the space’s railroad roots may be gleaned from two movies, “Altoona at Work: An Period of Steam” and “Start of a Curve,” proven within the first ground Norfolk Southern Theater.
The second ground “Railroad Work” and “A Metropolis of Railroaders” reveals convey early-Altoona again to life by way of its storefront and neighborhood recreations, akin to Dutch Hill and Little Italy, and even options an intensive Pennsylvania Railroad mannequin practice structure.
“The Pennsy was the ‘engine’ of Altoona’s development,” it explains. “However the firm didn’t construct town that made up ‘the remainder of the practice.'” Though it based, laid out, and aided it, it elected to not personal and assemble town past the precise outlets. Nonetheless, the corporate’s energy and affect coursed via its arteries. Its many neighborhoods have been the results of railroaders reinvesting their financial savings to construct homes, which, in flip, supplied income-supplementing rents.
The customer can briefly step into their sneakers. On the Newstand, which was previously positioned on the twelfth Avenue Bridge, a boy, “standing” behind it in holograph type and bordered by magazines on the market, relates tales about outdated Altoona. In Kelly’s Bar, which was as soon as positioned on the threshold to one of many many railroad outlets, you can too listen in on the speak of the city.
A number of residents shared insights via the philosophies they left behind. Sally Value, for example-a Pennsylvania Railroad clerk-proclaimed, “A unclean metropolis was good as a result of it meant that individuals had work. We at all times thought of it gold mud, not coal mud. That is what made America run.”
In Might of 1936, Fortune journal reported, “Consider the Pennsylvania Railroad as a nation at struggle. The lads who transfer these trains are troopers on obligation, day and evening.”
And the far-reaching worth of the railroad’s monitor community, which in the end unfold all through the northeast like a spider’s net, was captured by this compact gem: “Journey is the nation’s college.”
There was no extra applicable title for a railroad than that which mirrored the very state it conquered and linked with the remainder of the nation.
The museum’s third ground reveals, which provide a youngsters’s focus, embody “Railroaders as American Heroes,” “The World’s Honest,” “Find out how to Run a Railroad,” “A Report back to the Shareholders,” “The Check Labs,” and “The Finish of an Period.”
Exterior, the museum invitations the customer to “stand on the heart of what was as soon as the best railroad store complicated within the world-the Altoona Works of the Pennsylvania Railroad.” Established in 1850, together with the city, the outlets finally sprouted throughout 218 acres and occupied 122 buildings. Containing 88 acres underneath roof, they held 4,500 machine instruments and 94 overhead cranes. 4 distinct teams of buildings emerged.
The outlets met the Pennsylvania Railroad’s ever-growing have to construct, take a look at, restore, and rebuild an unlimited fleet. Within the eight-decade interval from 1866 to 1946, some 6,873 steam, diesel-electric, and electrical locomotives have been produced right here, together with hundreds of standard–and the world’s first all-steel–cars, of which 16,415 for freight alone emerged from its doorways between 1921 and 1940.
At the moment, you’ll be able to examine a number of sorts of Pennsylvania Railroad vehicles, inclusive of a Class N5 cabin automotive/caboose (quantity 477577), a Class X29L metal boxcar (quantity 2136), an specific fridge automotive (quantity 2561), and a Class D78F eating automotive (quantity 4468). At 81 ft in size, this “Altoona-built restaurant on wheels” accommodated 36 at formally set tables, however a later reconfiguration decreased this quantity to 32, together with one other ten seated in a lounge part. In 1941, the Pennsylvania Railroad served 3.9 million meals.
Horseshoe Curve Nationwide Historic Landmark:
An progressive engineering method to conquering the Allegheny Mountains and thus present a trans-Pennsylvania, continuous-track, east-west rail hyperlink between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the Horseshoe Curve changed the inclined-plane hurdle employed by the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Situated 5.9 miles from the Railroaders Memorial Museum, it’s included in its admission worth.
With its rising reputation as a train-viewing space, Kattanning Level, web site of the curve, was developed right into a telegraph and sightseeing station in 1855, whereas a reservoir, constructed in the course of it, supplied water to the ever-growing metropolis of Altoona.
Demand for rail transport, generated by the equally rising nation’s want for factory-produced commodities, quickly necessitated elevated practice frequencies, which, in tun, required further monitor to accommodate. The Horseshoe Curve, opening with a single line, was quadrupled by the very finish of the nineteenth century, receiving a second monitor in 1898, a 3rd in 1899, and a fourth in 1900, the latter two of which may solely be laid after further clearance was supplied with removing of a part of the rock face–all the whereas achieved whereas trains continued to ply the within of the curve.
Accessed for the primary time by a macadam street in 1932, Kattanning Level sprouted a small stone visitor lodge at its base eight years later, nevertheless it was relegated to a present store and customer heart, since that very street was symbolic of what had regularly gnawed away on the monitor’s unique function. This particular station was subsequently demolished.
By 1957, operation of the park was transferred from the Pennsylvania Railroad to town of Altoona, and a decade later, Horseshoe Curve was designated a Nationwide Historic Landmark.
The semi-circular curve-an industrial hyperlink to the west, a topographical triumph, and a catalyst to growth-represents, in essence, an act of perfection, designed by and for the railroad which gave start to the very city the place its locomotives and rail vehicles have been manufactured in order that its Horseshoe Curve may join it with the remainder of the country-a single want, sparking a number of byproducts, to serve one another, none of which may have been attainable with out the opposite, in an final earthly expression of “creation.”
Two plaques attest to those info. The primary, reflecting its standing as a Nationwide Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, states, “Horseshoe Curve was designed and constructed underneath the course of Pennsylvania Railroad Chief Engineer, and later firm president, J. Edgar Thomson. When it opened, (it) was 366 meters throughout, 1,310 meters lengthy, and had a 1.8-percent grade.”
The second states, “Horseshoe Curve has been positioned on the Nationwide Register of Historic Railroad Landmarks-1854-2004. First railroad to cross the Allegheny Mountains between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh with a most grade of 1.87 %, was engineered by J. Edgar Thomson 150 years in the past.”
The museum, throughout from the reward store, options reveals entitled “Constructing the Curve,” “Upkeep,” and the “Altering Face of the Curve,” in addition to an space aid map and a small video room the place the movie “Start of the Curve” may be considered, if it was missed on the Railroaders Memorial Museum. It is usually the departure level of the 12-passenger funicular, which ascends to the summit of the ridge and the Horseshoe Curve viewing space. Alternatively, the realm may be reached by climbing the 194 steps.
A picnic table-dotted park, whose centerpiece is Pennsylvania Railroad diesel locomotive quantity 7048, permits the customer to view the frequent trains rounding the three tracks which presently comprise the Horseshoe Curve in entrance of him or the Kattanning Reservoir behind, which seems like a blue gem shimmering amidst the verdant hills. A train-viewing schedule, obtainable within the Customer Heart’s reward store, lists frequencies, approximate passing instances, and passenger- or freight-comprised operations, and is augmented by the loud speaker-broadcast transmissions from the precise trains. Twin-locomotive-pulled Norfolk Southern freight trains, emitting protesting screeches as they spherical the large curve on the furthest, shale rock-hugging monitor from the viewer, are frequent sights.
A plaque lists the curve as being 2,375 ft lengthy and having a nine-degree, 15-minute curve, a 220-degree central angle, a 1,594-foot east finish elevation, and a 91-foot-per-mile grade.
A board, positioned in entrance of the monitor and entitled “Over the Hill,” describes “how railroads surmounted the backbone of the Alleghenies between Altoona and Johnstown.”
The state-owned Allegheny Portage Railroad, after all, was the primary to take action, its jap terminus positioned simply west of Hollidaysburg and its “first of ten,” so designated as a result of it was the primary of its ten inclined planes. Duncansville served as the unique connecting level between it and the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose preliminary mainline had been routed via Altoona till the Horseshoe Curve opened in 1854.
Concurrent with its design had been the constructing of the continuous-track New Portage Railroad, which eradicated the awkward inclined-plane methodology of journey. Buying it in 1857, the Pennsylvania Railroad failed to make use of it till 1904, when elevated freight transport demand necessitated a reliever route, however deserted it a second time in 1981.
Space tracks had additionally been utilized by the S. E. Baker Railroad and, later, by the Glen White Coal and Lumber Firm.
At the moment, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s mainline, originating in New York and routed via Philadelphia and Harrisburg, arcs via the Horseshoe Curve earlier than negotiating quite a few, however lesser ones, together with the McGinleys, McCanns, AG, Greenough, Brandimarte, Allegrippus, Chilly, Bennington, and Salpino curves. Persevering with via the Allegheny and New Portage tunnels, it proceeds to Pittsburgh and the west-the aim envisioned greater than a century and a half in the past.