I'm PJ O'Connell for the Pennsylvania Parade.

One of the most enduring American industries at the emotional level is the railroad, especially the steam railroads of the early 20th century.

It's hard to imagine former workers, glamour-struck outsiders, and generations of children buying postcards or other memorabilia of a canning factory or a sawmill.

Railroad buffs do all that and more.

Railroading occupies a special place in American nostalgia.

And among railroads, none possesses the mystique of the company, The Pennsylvania Railroad.

And among the Pennsy's key cities, none generates more or better memories than Altoona, site of the Altoona shops.

For years, the mechanical hub of "The Standard Railroad of the World."

And no one tells those stories better than the oldtimers who spent important parts of their lives working on the railroad.

I think we got to see more of our world, our mother nature, as far as sunrises, sunsets, storms, lightning, or whatever you want to say, full moons, we had the works.

We saw some beauty of nature while we were working.

Oh, it was good.

I loved the Railroad.

We never took a day off because he was always afraid we'd miss something.

[laughter] I went to work for the Railroad up there when it was the Pennsylvania Railroad up there back in 1928, about November.

Just fresh out of high school.

I worked for the Railroad for 40 years.

Basically, I operated a punch in the Juniata blacksmith shop.

I started to work for the company Pennsylvania Railroad shop December 16, 1918.

We worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Yeah.

["I'VE BEEN WORKING ON THE RAILROAD" PLAYING] We were Pennsylvania men.

(SINGING) All the live-long day I've been working on the railroad Just to pass-- I hired 19-- June '41 when I was just over 18 years of age.

I was a conductor on the Railroad and the brakeman for 33 years and three months.

Worked the biggest part of my time over on the Clearfield branch down around Bellefonte and Lock Haven.

I worked in the Altoona yard, Hollidaysburg yard, car shop.

I was a yardmaster.

I started in handfiring engines over here on the mountain hauling coal over.

And they ended up I was running the Broadway Limited for 10 years.

So I'd have a total of 54 years.

But I was furloughed so much that my actual working years was only 43, 44.

Now retired 1970.

And I've been loafing around ever since.

NARRATOR: Like most of us, they worked.

But they worked at a special time in a special place on the Railroad in Altoona, Pennsylvania in the middle decades of the 20th century.

In Altoona, the Railroad, or more often, the company, was The Pennsylvania Railroad.

Hauler of coal and steel and millions of passengers.

Designer and builder of locomotives, cars, bridges, and stations, and much more.

From the very beginning, Altoona meant railroad.

Well, the Railroad was at with the town.

Well, it was a railroad town.

Oh, it wouldn't have been no Altoona if there wouldn't have been a railroad.

It was a railroad town.

It was a company town.

Well, when they came here, I guess, they owned the town.

They built the houses for their people.

And they practically owned the town.

NARRATOR: It began with commerce.

Philadelphia businessmen trying to beat New York and Baltimore to the markets in Pittsburgh and beyond.

But the origins of Altoona, Pennsylvania finally came down to geography.

The most favorable grade to the foot of the alleghenies led up the Juniata River Valley to David Robson's farm purchased by the fledgling Pennsylvania Railroad company in 1849 as the site of a new settlement.

The 1,000 foot climb to the top of the mountains would involve construction of the famous Horseshoe Curve.

Altoona would provide the support base for construction.

And more significantly, for continued operations of what would become "The Standard Railroad of the World."

As the Railroad grew, so grew Altoona.

Each doubling and then redoubling in size.

If the company needed coal and water for its trains, it also needed people, workers for the railroad.

TOM HOLLOBAUGH: Good place here for the shops.

And it was right at the foot of the mountain where they could stop the trains and recrew them.

And do whatever they had to do to get over the mountain.

But they had control of practically all the water around the town because they needed all the water they could get for running steam locomotives and run their shops.

That went on for a good many years because everybody in town practically worked for the Railroad company.

This town used to be a lot of foreigners in this town.

It was cheap labor at one time.

And that's what built this town up.

When they got that cheap labor from the foreigners that was in this town.

Pennsylvania Railroad here, I think, you could probably say 75% of the people worked for the Railroad.

The Railroad was a city.

And don't let anybody that's living today tell you it wasn't.

Without the Railroad, I think the Altoona wouldn't be.

People in Altoona now complain because the noise the Railroad makes or because of the dirt the Railroad makes.

When I started to work on the Railroad in 1937, there was over 14,000 people worked here and 14,000 families lived off the Railroad.

And that's a power of people.

Let's say, my dad was a railroader all his life.

So he was.

And dad was a brakeman in the yard.

And we enjoyed railroading very much.

It was a railroading family you might call it.

But my dad didn't work for the Railroad and his brother.

And my dad's father and his brother worked for the Railroad.

And my brother and I, we worked for the Railroad.

My grandfather worked for the Railroad.

My dad worked for the Railroad.

I worked for the Railroad.

A couple brothers worked for the Railroad.

Practically, everybody in my family when I was young had worked for the Railroad company.

My dad was a clerk.

JOHN CATINA: My father and mother had friends here and came from Italy.

And they found out about Altoona.

So they came here after I was born.

Lots of immigrants came to Altoona here.

Because those that were here and worked in the shops, they notified others, different countries, and they started to come over themselves.

Yeah.

We had Russians, Polish, Slovaks, English, and German, Italian, Blacks, Mexican.

There's Polish people, Irish and Italians, Germans, and whatnot.

NORMAN MCARTHUR: My grandfather came over in '85.

He had 13 children.

Then my dad started working when he was 14 years old.

I had another uncle who was a year younger than my dad and he started when he was 14 years old.

Another uncle was only 11 years old.

And he went in the shops at 11 years old.

And how my uncles got in?

At that time, the foremens could hire whoever they wanted.

So my grandfather, being the foreman of the paint shop, brought his children in to work, in his shop.

(SINGING) Don't you hear the whistle blow.

BOB GRASSMYER: My dad worked there about 44 years.

He never complained about it.

He went to work every day.

And he rode a bus and then had to walk down to East Altoona.

And then he had to walk across the bridge and about a mile and a half to get there every morning.

And then walk back and catch the bus back home at night, or a streetcar, I mean.

Rode a streetcar.

And after I got off the streetcar, the Rose Hill Cemetery, had another mile to walk home.

So he never missed work.

The majority of them guys never went through high school.

You know this as well as I did.

My father was hired in 1910.

He only had an eighth grade education.

And he was completely satisfied with the Railroad.

They could have dumped a bag of manure on him and he would have said a yes or no.

Me, I was of a different caliber.

I had a high school education.

I felt those things that was on there that could be made better.

But it was a job and it paid me good money.

And that's the way I felt about it.

So everybody was loyal to the Railroad.

When you got a job with the Railroad, you worked.

Very few-- they never-- you never heard of anybody getting fired.

If it was, there had to be pretty damn dirty to get fired off of that railroad.

NARRATOR: But if loyalty by both employer and worker was a common feature of railroad life in the early 20th century, there were other features which were equally common, but more unpleasant.

When I was about six years old, the first thing I ever got to know was the wreck whistle.

When you heard that wreck whistle sometimes 3 o'clock in the morning.

It would wake right up out of your sleep.

And just as you heard that whistle, you knew that what they was doing, they were calling the wreck train crew to get the wreck force ready to go to a wreck.

(SINGING) --road all the live-long day I've been working on-- NARRATOR: Human error may have been the immediate cause, but wooden cars that collapsed on impact made matters worse.

Wrecks like this hastened the move to steel coaches.

(SINGING) Don't you hear the whistle blowing Rise up so early in the morn' Don't you hear the captain shouting NARRATOR: But when you worked for the railroad, wrecks were more than a spectator sport.

The risks were real.

Dangerous, very dangerous.

In the steam engine days, that no one would give us insurance unless we had a special clause in it, a hazardous clause, and we had to pay extra for our insurance if we bought it.

I didn't stay very long in the blacksmith shop because the gas, ovens in there left the fumes out when heat.

I breathed them fumes and couldn't hardly eat.

But the steel shop was called the slaughterhouse at one time.

In fact, it was when I came out of there, it was still called the slaughterhouse because the amount of accidents that happened in the steel shop, everybody had a finger missing or an eye out.

Until they come around to putting goggles on everybody.

And everybody had to wear goggles in the steel shop.

You also had to wear safety shoes.

You also had to wear a hard hat.

Now, when I started didn't have to have that all.

It always was very dangerous.

From 1926 to 1941, during the Depression years, they didn't hire any men in the train or engine department at all.

So with the war coming on, in 1941, they had to hire a lot.

All at once.

And they had too many new men and very few experienced men.

It was a slaughter.

An awful lot of them were killed.

Friends of yours and friends of mine.

Oh, it was nice.

It was nice as long as it was nice weather now riding the hump in their Juniata Scales.

In the fog and cold weather, it was dangerous.

I'll tell you.

NARRATOR: The East Altoona Hump.

Freight classification yards worked by gravity.

Cars empty and loaded.

Coasted down from the hump and were switched on to the proper track.

A brakeman rode the car controlling the speed with a manual brake wheel.

RICHARD BOTTEICHER: And lots and lots of nights, we rode those humps that you could look down at the brake wheel you had to hold up.

And even though you couldn't even see your hands or see your gloves or brake bright club or anything else.

It was that foggy.

Say, you get down over them humps at night.

You couldn't see your hand in front of you from East Altoona.

The steam was black and the smoke coming up from the roundhouse down there, East Altoona roundhouse, you didn't know where he was moving.

Or get on a car and go down through the yard.

And sometimes, you'd get down and you'd be stopped.

And you still thought you was moving.

And I refused to do it.

And so he called me in on the carpet.

And he told me, he says, well, I refused the yardmaster.

That's the way it was.

And of course, the assistant trainmaster called me in.

And I told him, I said, I told that yardmaster that that situation was there and it was up to him to correct it, to get it done before anybody got hurt.

And I said he refused to do it.

And he told me to go in there and do it.

Well, that supervisor told me, he said, well, he said you, you were wrong for refusing not to do it.

I said, even if I'd got hurt?

He says, yes, indeedy.

He said, you go ahead and do what you're told to do.

Then put in your complaint.

Yes, I said from a hospital bed or something like that.

He laughed about it.

But that's the truth.

That's the one with-- back in those days, a lot of these here superintendents and supervisors, they just thought that you had to do it, whether it was unsafe or whether it wasn't unsafe.

Move safety.

That was the main thing.

That you had to read that rule every day, safety rule.

And if you got hurt or anything, they had a rule to cover.

It didn't matter what you did, you was in wrong.

It was their benefit to show that they were interested in safety and had their safety programs for the insurance companies and whatnot because they demanded that.

And of course, the state government to the labor bureau.

You got to keep your wits about you.

It is dangerous.

I lost the end of this finger on a 1,500 pounds per square inch hammer.

Straightening out a job, me and another guy.

And there's a few accidents in there now and then.

If you're not very careful, you have to be careful in there.

I also saw three men killed.

While at the time I was working.

I saw a man who was burning a center seal out.

And when he burned the center part of it out, it came together.

And he happened to have his head in between it.

And that killed him.

It came together and squeezed his head and killed him.

I have a picture here of my dad on one of the shifting engines that made up trains down in the yard.

Down by the vineyard with harlot.

But he was killed.

He was caught between the couplers of cars.

In 1935, when he was making up a train.

It was about 7:30 in the morning.

And he got there and he died instantly.

Of course, he was crushed.

And it was a sad affair for us.

But when they settled-- made a settlement with my mother, see, for a pittance sum, I said to my mother, said, why don't you try to make an agreement with him that I would get a job with the Railroad company.

And you know what the adjuster told her, he said, we don't deal in jobs.

We deal in money.

And we know you need the money.

[laughs] My father was killed in the Railroad in April 19, 1944.

My father was a conductor just the same as I was.

He was a conductor at the passenger station in Altoona.

After that, people talked me-- tried to talk me into quitting railroading due to the fact that my father was killed.

But I contended.

I was no reason to quit.

And I even went as far as to take a job up at the same place and straighten out a few of the safety hazards.

And as long as I worked up there, those safety conditions were upheld when I bid off and went to another job.

Slowly, they were forgotten and went right back into the other things that they had practices they had done before that.

[laughs] There was lots of times that you felt, what in the dickens did I have to hire on this kind of a job?

But one of the driving forces was the pay.

The pay was all for good for an uneducated person.

I'll put it that way.

We had some educated people with us.

But majority of them were just plain high school graduates.

NARRATOR: Of the 15,000 or so who worked for the Railroad in Altoona, the majority may have been uneducated, but they were hardly unskilled.

led by some of the best technicians and managers of the time, they made Altoona, Pennsylvania, a center of the railroad industry worldwide.

If you take a good look at the steam locomotive looking over from top to bottom, and you figure out the engineering feats that it took to put that engine together, when you can take like say, a pound of coal and a gallon of water and turn it into the power that you use to move that steam engine.

They had the best of the shops here.

They had the best mechanics.

Sure, they had the best mechanics in the world at one time, machinist and all.

And you can build those steam engines like they did here with these mechanics and machinists they had.

You had to have the best.

And that's what built this town up.

Railroads in the early days had their own engineering departments.

Designed their own cars and locomotives.

It certainly was a remarkable feat.

And when you consider that the Pennsylvania Railroad had locomotive erecting shops where they built locomotives all across its system, and every other small railroad did too, it's even more remarkable.

NARRATOR: The best designers, the best machinists, the best materials.

Building the railroads equipment became Altoona's trademark.

RICHARD GEIST: Today, if you were writing about the Silicon Valley of 100 and 110 years ago, you would be writing about Altoona, Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Railroad, the standard railroad.

Well, that's true.

And you can still travel around the world.

And I've been overseas.

And met with railroaders in Britain and Germany and Japan and mentioned Altoona.

And their eyes light up and they know exactly what you're talking about.

Because Altoona was an early Mecca for railroads, and particularly, locomotive construction.

When you think of a self-contained company where everything was designed, manufactured, and the standards set were here in Altoona.

This was the place.

And they not only set the standards for their own railroad, they set the standard for manufacturing and of all products and industry throughout the United States.

I believe at one time, there were more patents and inventions that came out of Altoona than any city this size in the United States.

We were the high tech center at one time.

The one term that does come to mind is that it became or was known of or self-anointed itself as "The Standard Railroad of the World."

And there were standards for everything.

Standard paints, standard fence posts, standard hardware for doors, standard office windows.

The drawings that were produced for railroad buildings and the standardization across this system was just phenomenal.

And of course, that was an early indication of how efficient a railroad could be run or at least might have been run if things worked out a little better.

NARRATOR: Standardization included materials as well as designs.

All new supplies and equipment purchased for use throughout the Pennsy system passed through the Altoona test plant.

ROBERT WATSON: Before anything like that was bought on large scale, the inspectors would sample it and send it back to the products and send it back to the test plant for test.

And if it passed their test, it was accepted.

And we bought them.

And if it didn't, well, tough luck.

We'll find another supplier.

NARRATOR: But besides light bulbs and lineman's gloves, the railroad also tested the largest of its products in Altoona.

[music playing] ROBERT WATSON: In Altoona, of course, there was a locomotive test plant, a treadmill on which steam locomotives could be hooked up and run in a stationary condition to measure their efficiency, their horsepower, and all sorts of other characteristics.

[music playing] A machine that I thought was very unique.

A lot of the testing equipment was designed and built by the people in the test department.

And one that I remember very well that always fascinated me was the broom testing machine in the basement.

And there was a large Rube Goldberg machine that into which you would fix the handle of a track broom, which was a very stiff broom, and it would sweep back and forth across a concrete pad endlessly.

And they would see how long it took to wear down the bristles of the broom and whether or not the broom's quality met the standard of "The Standard Railroad of the World."

INTERVIEWER: What memories do you have of Altoona?

Well, I'll tell you, it was an awful, dirty city.

NARRATOR: Combining a pound of coal and a gallon of water may have produced power.

But it also produced steam and smoke.

I know when I first moved to Altoona, my neighbors thought that there was something the matter with me because I was always cleaning the windows and always taking down the curtains because I wasn't used to this railroad dirt.

There was nothing to go to work and women was out there early in the morning sweeping sparks and cinders off their porch and getting ready to scrub their front porch.

And that was accepted.

You might call it dirty.

But I think the people was used to it.

It was a way of survival for Altoona so they didn't complain, I don't think.

There might have been a few people complained.

But their men made their livelihood through there, so there would be not very good for them to complain too much about it.

That was about the way they had to put up with it.

NARRATOR: Altoona seldom complained.

Local businessmen went along.

Politicians went along.

Workers went along, usually.

In 1877, the first nationwide railroad strike, the result of train crew layoffs, led to violence in Pittsburgh.

Altoona was interested, but not actively involved.

45 years later, in 1922, attitudes had changed somewhat.

That's the first anybody ever came and tried to unionize the shops and they promised an awful lot of things, which there was no chance other than getting.

(SINGING) All the live long day NARRATOR: The strike centered in Chicago, involving big labor, big business, and big politics.

Altoona newspapers found workers were less than totally committed.

Community leaders and editors counseled caution.

And the Railroad made its position in the matter perfectly clear.

(SINGING) Hear the whistle blowing Rise up so-- RICHARD BOTTEICHER: A lot of those fellows lost their job.

Because they had this strike and a lot of them walked out and there was no work for them.

They couldn't bump out into the big yard.

They couldn't bump out onto the road because they had no seniority out there whatsoever.

So the result was they lost out.

See, they had a strike way back in 1922 because we had about five guys from Altoona that came clean to Cartimar and worked while they were out on strike over here.

And they came to Cartimar and worked.

And some of them worked till they retired over at Cartimar.

Well, they had a name for them, which you've heard.

Yeah.

That's the reason they called Altoona scab town.

Altoona was considered as a scab town for years.

Did none of the railroads tell you about that?

No, they wouldn't.

[chuckles] At that time, there was no income.

You had no income at all.

You were lived on what you had saved.

And then the shop said anybody who wanted to come back to work could come back to work.

And of course, dad was one that went back to work.

But there was quite a few that never went back to work for the Railroad.

And all of them snuck back into the job.

They didn't last out on the strike.

They snuck back on the job and that's when Altoona called it scab town.

The majority of them, they got fired and wouldn't let them work in the shops anymore.

Altoona was considered as a scab town for years.

You leave Altoona to go somewhere else to get a job, don't you mention Altoona.

Yeah.

Because it was considered that a strict scab town.

They had thousands of men working for them and it was actually a good place to work.

So it was because you have a steady income until about 1928.

It was when it started to have what they call a feast or famine.

NARRATOR: By the late 1920s, American railroading was beginning to run out of economic steam.

Following the stock market crash of 1929, the rest of the nation rapidly followed suit.

During the Depression, I was on the extra list most of the time because I didn't have enough service to hold down a regular job.

But I always had enough of work.

That didn't justify me to try to find a job someplace else.

And the way jobs were at that time, I doubt if I found another place.

We had some money saved up and the insurance policies we had, we could turn one of them in and help us along.

At that time, everything was cheap.

And buy a dozen eggs for about $0.12.

Well, during the Depression, there wasn't too much.

I spent a lot of time on the streets during the Depression.

I was furloughed for, let me see, about six or seven years, I suppose, at one time.

NARRATOR: The '30s were tough.

Wage cuts were quietly agreed to.

A political upheaval.

Profound, but orderly took place.

Businesses and their workers struggled with new ideas and attitudes.

The growth of the industrial unions and the arrival of the 40-hour week.

Oh, my father thought that was terrible.

He was used to working seven days all his life.

Everybody was for that as far as was concerned.

Of course, there were a few old.

And the old I wouldn't say diehard, but they were died in the wool railroad people that didn't make a difference to them one way or another.

But the younger people, why give us a little bit more time to socialize.

That all day, some of them didn't even speak to us for a long while.

They just thought that was terrible.

I can remember my dad and I got in a couple set-tos about that.

He didn't think that we should work or have to work five days a week and call it a week.

I used to say to him, I said, dad, I'd say on Sunday, you and mom sit here.

I said, she cooks all day because you have to work.

I said, here's your neighbor.

I said, he works in the shops.

I said, he crawls in his family in an automobile and they go for a ride somewhere or go for the day.

And I said, here, you have to work all day.

I said, and he's living just as good as you are.

He's probably bringing home within a few dollars of what you're bringing home.

I said, what's the difference?

My work was from New York to Chicago, New York to Saint Louis, and New York to Boston.

And was no particular hours on that.

Until we got a union.

And after we got unionized, then we went under the 40-hour week thing.

Yeah.

After we got the 40 hours, we started on overtime.

See we used to work 16 to 17 hours a day.

Yeah.

Before and during the war, they had kind of a loose type of union that was more or less operated with the railroad sanction.

It was a brotherhood.

Brotherhood of Shop Craft workers.

Well, it seems as though the Brotherhood of Railroad Shop Crafts was more of an amicable group.

Your committeemen were-- some of the men would say, there was one in bed with the railroad.

But when the CIO shop craft come in or group come in, the stewards and them, they were more forceful what they wanted.

They say you have to do this and you have to do that.

And they made much emphasis that what they say was the way you had to do things.

Sometimes, they wouldn't even listen to what you had to say.

The cooperation wasn't there.

The union men, they seemed to instill in the men that more or less all you had to do is show up.

These guys can't do this, can't do that.

And do the other thing.

And of course, the supervisor, on the other hand, they got a program to get and they get into these guys and tell them got to do it whether it is or not.

And after a bit, until everybody learned that we had a contract to live by both union and management, then things-- then things straightened out a little bit.

It seem to me that a union's job, when they're working with railroad companies, is to see that their members work.

After all, when they started their unions and formed their unions and got them organized and everything, they more or less seemed to take over the work that the man was doing.

They could tell them what they could do and what they couldn't do rather than the company telling them that.

And I think there was a lot of times that the could have got more out of the man.

And I wouldn't say more out of the man there.

But they didn't seem to care too much about what the man did.

As long as they-- this is a kind of a delicate, delicate thing here.

One issue would not be solved, or perhaps even be recognized until much later.

It can be shown only obliquely in this isolated photograph.

There are almost no images of one group of workers who, for the most part, simply were not there to be seen.

When I hired, the only Black workers we had were some at the freight station where I worked for about a week or so.

The average Black man did not start work now.

They had crews that worked on the engines down there.

They were in Juniata.

You had quite a few Blacks working down there.

That was in the '20s.

And they were cleaning those clinkers out of the engines.

They didn't work in the shops.

They weren't considered as shop workers.

They were considered as shop employees.

They were laborers what they called the roundhouse.

Well, in Altoona time that the heyday of the railroad, there wasn't too many Black people living in Altoona.

There were several employed at East Altoona as mechanics and fire watchers and so on that.

I don't know whether they didn't hire them or whether they did apply or what.

Maybe they didn't want to hire on there or didn't go to hire.

But my guess is hiring anybody to come there during the war years.

Let's put it that way.

Then how they segregated them.

Yeah, that's how it was.

They segregated them.

Yeah.

Mostly, in the big cities or down South where a lot of the white men didn't want to fire.

It was a hot job.

It was a job they didn't want.

They felt they were better-- better-- well, they just felt they didn't want it.

But Pennsylvania was a less segregated railroad.

I put it that way.

Pennsylvania Railroad was a less segregated railroad.

Because whenever we used to run into New York from Washington to New York.

The Southern, the Seaboard, the Coastline, all of them came in there, they were segregated railroad.

They had special coaches for Black people.

They had special times for Black people eating in the train.

If they didn't send a bush up through there selling sandwiches or something, they didn't get no meal.

Yeah.

But the Pennsylvania was a less segregated railroad that they had over the country.

Yeah.

NARRATOR: December 7th, 1941, war came to America.

And prosperity returned to Altoona.

City of Altoona was bustling in 1941.

Seemed to be at its heyday.

It was very nice.

11th Avenue was crowded just about 24 hours a day.

You could walk up there and look in the store windows and have a joyful evening just walking the avenue.

Streetcars were plentiful.

It was just like my dad used to say, never run after a streetcar or a woman because there would be one by in the next five minutes.

They had a population of around 87,000, about 86,000.

And sometimes, when he went downtown to shop, you had to walk out in the street.

The sidewalk was always crowded.

It was certainly a boom time.

And of course, the truck industry hadn't developed at all.

The roads hadn't.

There were no superhighways except the Pennsylvania Turnpike in those days.

And so the railroad did all the major hauling in the country, by far the major hauling in the country.

And they provided a lot of service through Altoona.

And this was the busiest railroad in the country before the war and during the war.

This quarter from Philadelphia to Chicago from Saint Louis.

I think it was trains running behind one another, a solid train just like this signal light-- from signal to signal, a part going down and coming up loaded.

There was 52 passenger trains in about 52 passenger trains a day in and out of Altoona.

It was a busy place.

And fortunately, the Railroad changed.

They had a big increase during World War 2 and hired many, many people.

And many, many women, by the way, at that time.

Very unusual for a woman to work for the railroad.

That's why, at the time I went in, my husband was sick.

And they was taking applications for people.

And I thought, well, the rest of them was I would do you know.

They probably had to put up with a lot as far as foul language was concerned.

But they didn't have near the foul language back in those days as you do now.

There were more they-- most of the men were more and more gentlemen around women than they find today.

My wife worked out there at Ennis.

She worked on the engines.

Yeah.

She-- what was you on the engines?

Hustler.

WOMAN: [inaudible] [laughs] She was crawling across the train out there at Ennis, oiling.

And they moved the train.

And she quit.

[laughs] And all we had to do was go around and pick up stuff that these men would drop working on the trains and things.

And we had to keep the coffee going.

And we brought goodies in to keep the men contented so that we didn't have to do anything.

Now they hired in where I went in the storehouse as permanent employees.

And then they had a bunch of women they hired as shop crafts.

They were temporary employees.

They were furloughed six months after the war.

After the war was over when they didn't need us any longer, the Railroad paid us unemployment.

It was nice.

I would say it was a wonderful company to work for.

So there had to be making money.

Hauling a lot of government equipment was going through here.

War equipment.

You'd seen it trained solid trains of it.

But what happened to the money?

Pst, pst.

Down the river, I guess.

Too many vice presidents and presidents in the railroad.

And that was-- that was the downfall.

NARRATOR: Railroading changed dramatically after World War II.

Traffic decreased.

Revenues dropped.

Costs went up.

But some things remained distressingly familiar.

And so after a while, we started going down grade.

That was right before we hit the curve, Bennington curve.

And so the train had picked up speed at that particular time.

And it was going pretty fast.

February the 19th, 1947, The Pittsburgh Press, The New York Mirror, The Newsreels.

REPORTER: One of the nation's track limiteds, the Red Arrow from Detroit to New York plunges into a deep gully near the picturesque Horseshoe Curve West of Altoona, Pennsylvania.

NARRATOR: The nation's attention focused tragically on Altoona, Pennsylvania.

REPORTER: --that was once a luxury flyer before its pre-dawn crash that cost the lives of more than a score and sent 128 injured to hospital beds.

And we went straight down and slid down about 150 feet I think.

They said it was 150 feet.

I don't know.

But it was a long ways down there I know that.

REPORTER: Numerous tales of heroism on the part of crew members and passengers in saving lives and freeing injured were recorded.

I was covered with blood.

And I thought-- after we got up to the top of the hill, I was going over bodies that were strewn out there-- and I thought it was on me.

REPORTER: --killed an engineer and two firemen.

And dragged most of the 14 car limited into a mass of junk below a curve on which the normal speed is but 19 miles per hour.

What I mean, it's a miracle.

Yeah.

A lot of people say it's luck.

But that was a miracle.

All of us you hear the people at that time at night screaming and hollering and everything like that.

And it's quite an experience.

NARRATOR: In the 1950s, the railroad industry was changing rapidly, especially economically.

But railroading was changing visually as well.

And the most vivid example of that change was the gradual disappearance of the railroad's signature image, the steam locomotive.

The steam era, as far as I'm concerned, was the heyday of the railroading industry.

That's how I feel.

We always called the steam engine, "she."

Have you ever heard the expression?

It was always "she."

It was never "it."

It was just like a person.

When you was around a steam engine, it was alive.

You hear the air pump going and you hear the safety valve pop.

You hear the turbine, the generator that you have your electricity from.

It was singing when it was on.

It made a singing sound.

LEONARD HARDY: It was fascinating.

Let me put it to you that way.

To get on and hear that chug, chug of that locomotive.

How they would have to pull to go up a hill and hear it barking when you're going up through those cuts?

At night, see the fire flying out the stack of the engine.

No, it's the engine.

Man was working that engine properly and was doing his job.

It was just a thrill.

At that particular time, I was young.

And I thought it was one of the greatest things that I had ever witnessed whenever I first took one of those air runs on one of those steam locomotives.

The first ride I ever took, I thought it was wonderful.

Did you ever hear of the romance of the rails?

There is.

There is a certain excitement there.

A certain romance to it.

But when I go to bed at night and my back aches, is back on those old steam engines.

[laughter] But with a diesel engine, everything about a diesel engine is cold.

And when it shuts down, when it was shut down, it was the coldest thing to work around there ever was.

Front braking on a steam engine to travel 130 miles.

It was really, really bad and rough.

No wonder I have arthritis of the spine now.

They were wicked.

Absolutely.

Then to ride a diesel after that, it was heaven.

It saved him a lot of money.

I guess they finally saw that it was going to save them a lot of money as far as maintenance was concerned.

Because the steam locomotive, you had to have somebody keep it fired up all the time if you were going to use it.

They were a beautiful piece of machinery and Pennsylvania knew how to build them.

But they just weren't feasible.

Just too many moving parts and too many people to handle it.

And that's one of the problems with the railroad when they were running their wheels off of them, so to speak, why there wasn't time for repair.

They needed it.

And that was the beginning of the downfall of the especially the steam engines there.

It just takes an awful lot of people to maintain a steam engine.

NARRATOR: November 27, 1957, Dwight Eisenhower was recovering from a heart attack.

Orphan Annie and Joe Palooka headed the comic pages.

Warren Spahn was the best in baseball.

But when engine 4271 dropped its fires at the East Altoona engine house that evening, signaling the end of the steam era on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

No public notice was taken.

They'd done most of their business around here on coal and steel.

And the coal fell off and so did the steel.

They closed down the Juniata Scale.

They closed down the Homer Hump and the WJ Hump.

And that was especially heavy in the '50s.

The Railroad didn't have the boom that the other industries had because the truck industry was beginning to develop.

We were beginning to build highways and the truck industry was taking business away from the Railroad.

And the Railroad was laying off and Altoona was suffering.

No, they killed themselves.

Well, the trucks helped.

But the Railroad killed themselves.

They didn't want to give the people the business.

All they wanted to do was grab a train out of New York and haul it straight to Chicago and unload it, or Saint Louis or someplace to unload it.

They didn't want that little stuff in between.

We lost a class of people.

The Railroad lost a class of people.

Not the average.

Because the average person still rides train.

But a class of people, we lost.

We lost a professional man.

Oh, my.

They've cut-- there's hardly anything left.

There's no railroading around here at all anymore.

I don't know what they've got down at Juniata.

How many people have gotten locomotive department down there anymore.

I know it's Sam Ray.

I think maybe they've got a couple hundred people.

And maybe one time we had out there maybe 1,200, 1,400.

When I became president, we had over 1,100 members in our local.

And the employment on the railroad started to dwindle.

And it went down and down.

When I retired, I'd say we had around 260 members, including the retired members.

When I first went in the Railroad, we had 15,000 employees right in between Altoona and the car shop in Juniata, 15,000 employees.

There was quite a few.

Today, I think if you get 5,000 all over, you, you're lucky.

When you walk down Chestnut Avenue and see the shops knowing what shops were there that are not there anymore, that are torn down and gone, it really hurts it.

I never thought I'd live to see the day to see these shops torn down or to see the amount of men reduced the way it is.

It makes you wonder.

Well, that's the wheels of progress, I guess.

You got to go along with them.

Whatever.

So, it hurt.

One final indignity remained.

Economic pressures forced the Pennsy, once strong, proud, The Standard Railroad of the World, into uncomfortable partnership with its principal competitor, The New York Central.

You would have seen the crap that we got in here.

The busted down engines and cars that we got in off of that merger.

That was the biggest mistake that Pennsylvania ever, ever done when they merged with New York Central.

New York Central didn't have-- they expected us to use their running equipment and it wasn't fit for dogs.

There were just, just couldn't work.

There were a lot of egos involved, a lot politics involved.

nobody was able to say, what stop and look at it again after all the conditions were laid on it by the government.

And-- Finally, "On June 21, 1970, with a sickening crash that frightened Wall Street, jarred both the United States economy and its government, and scared off foreign investors, the nation's largest railroad went broke."

The ultimate bankruptcy and the demise of the Eastern railroads was probably might have been put off for a little while, but could not have been avoided.

At least the way the railroads were headed in those days.

We said it wouldn't last and it didn't last.

Because you had too many vice presidents and presidents in there who wanted the money.

So they merged in there.

Well, that's exactly what happened.

The big-- the wheels got the money and they went bankrupt.

Stock went up in value gradually.

And it kept going up.

And of course, this seemed like a good idea.

We were getting more money each year.

We're getting pretty good dividends.

And I remember when I got up to $75 a share, this looked pretty good to me.

And all of a sudden, stocks started to go down.

And it went down pretty fast.

I figured, well, it was just a downward trend for a while and it would go back up again.

But instead of going back up again, it went down to zero.

And that's when we went bankrupt.

So I lost, I would say, half of the stock that I had invested in.

And they said, of course, you come out in the papers and how true it was.

I don't know that those was on the inside track in Philadelphia made a bundle on it because they sold their stock when it was way up.

NARRATOR: Only the federal government seemed big enough to rescue the bankrupt railroads.

And it did.

With the eventual formation of Amtrak for passenger traffic and Conrail for freight.

Christ, Charlie McLaughlin and all that crowd from Lewistown How's Charlie looking?

Good.

Here, we had about three cords of wood on the scoop.

[laughter] Oh, Jack.

And that's why we get together once a month so we can lie to each other.

[laughs] NARRATOR: They worked.

And now many are retired.

The Pennsy, as they knew it, is gone.

Railroading has changed.

And Altoona is no longer the high tech center of the industry.

But some important things remain.

Satisfaction in earning a good living.

Relief in escaping injury or even death.

Pride in a job well done.

What remains are memories.

Thousands of personal recollections of the tragedies and the triumphs of lives spent working on the railroad.

I enjoyed working for them.

I enjoyed every bit of the time I spent with them.

They treated me very fairly.

I think I've done just about as well as a man without an education could do.

Railroad for just the summer till school started and I was there 48 years.

I've got friends that went back to the time I hired back in 1936.

We get together every now and then.

I spent more time with those men in there than I did here at home with my wife.

Because you were there eight hours a day, sometimes six and seven-- You have to pass the time away.

And that was a good pastime for me working with the railroad.

I retired from Rose Tower.

That was East Altoona engine house in 1975.

I had almost 43 years.

I still got all my fingers and toes.

I didn't lose no limbs in the railroad.

I can't see railroading anymore the way railroading now.

I just can't believe it.

I don't know how they do it.

Hard thing to lay people off and was always a nice thing to call them back.

But I enjoyed the steam engine more than diesel.

Of course, diesel was nicer riding and of course, there was a lot warmer too.

I wore jeans, overalls for the first time.

Something which we didn't do.

And flannel shirts.

It meant a livelihood and a good one.

And I was thankful that I even got that job on the Railroad.

Because I felt then it was going to make it better-- I could better myself.

But it was an awful, hard, miserable life.

I wouldn't do it again for anything.

I sit here today and say, how did I ever survive it?

But you do.

When you have a job, you just keep going.

When my father got killed in the Railroad, I said that I would retire before they carried me off.

I got a lot out of it.

I got a lot of experience out of it.

It wasn't as easy as the people look at it.

I give them 40 years.

And I was happy.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

It was a big-- it was a big industry in Altoona.

And they hired thousands of people then.

Altoona seems to be in good shape today is, I think, a good testimony to the kind of people that are there.

In the early part of the century, this was definitely a railroad, a railroad city.

There was no question about it.

Altoona made the Railroad too.

It was a give and take situation.

The only place I know in the world where people work at a job and then for night time entertainment, get down by the tracks and watch trains.

But you made a good living.

I was satisfied with it.

And I liked it.

So it's all over now.

All, but the shouting.

[music playing] A Railroad city.

It truly was.

But things change.

The Pennsy disappeared.

Steam disappeared.

Passengers have almost disappeared.

Some sample hardware is being preserved.

Samplings of memories, such as this one, are being preserved.

But railroading is diesels and freight these days.

Not exactly the stuff of nostalgia.

It is railroading's past that generates the railroad mystique.

Perhaps, this documentary recollection can temper that mystique a bit by adding a more realistic account of time spent working on the railroad.

For Penn State Public Broadcasting, I'm PJ O'Connell.

[music playing]