On a narrow shelf of land below the Allegheny Mountains, the railroad made a city out of what had begun as a construction camp. When the Pennsylvania Railroad chose Altoona as the place to base its mountain crossing between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, it did more than lay track. It built repair sheds, machine shops, foundries, and car works that grew into one of the largest railroad shop complexes in the world, a place where thousands of workers built, rebuilt, and maintained the motive power that kept freight and passengers moving across the eastern United States.
By the early twentieth century the shop grounds covered roughly 242 acres and included 122 major buildings divided among the Altoona Machine Shops, Altoona Car Shops, Juniata Shops, and the South Altoona Foundries. In those buildings the company constructed or rebuilt thousands of locomotives, fabricated bridges and car parts, and carried out the kind of standardized testing that made the railroad famous among engineers. Between 1866 and 1946, 6,783 steam, diesel, and electric locomotives were manufactured in Altoona, a figure that rises above 7,000 when later work under Conrail and Norfolk Southern is added.
The result was more than an industrial plant. Altoona became what later historians called a “railroad city,” and the Altoona Works left behind a remarkably rich body of records, maps, photographs, and employee files that still allow families and researchers to reconstruct lives spent in the shops and in the neighborhoods clustered around them.
A Town Built for the Shops
The story begins in the late 1840s, when PRR officials looked for a base of operations near the steepest part of their planned main line over the Alleghenies. The new town of Altoona was laid out in 1849 to serve that purpose. In 1850 the company opened its first track into the town and built an initial shop building in the Twelfth Street area that combined a machine shop, woodworking shop, blacksmith shop, locomotive repair shop, and foundry.
From the start, the geography mattered. Altoona sits at the foot of the grade that climbs through the famous Horseshoe Curve, the sweeping loop of track that allowed PRR trains to gain elevation more gradually on the way to the summit at Gallitzin. The shops in town and the engine facilities at East Altoona formed the back-of-house complex that kept that mountain railroad running. A historic marker today recalls how the first repair facilities arose beside the new line in 1850, then steadily expanded as the railroad grew.
Company needs shaped the town that grew up around them. Housing additions, streetcar lines, schools, and churches clustered near the shop gates, creating working-class neighborhoods that revolved around shift changes and whistle blows. The context study Railroad City: Four Historic Neighborhoods in Altoona, Pennsylvania, compiled by Kim E. Wallace for the Historic American Buildings Survey and Historic American Engineering Record, treats those neighborhoods as historic resources in their own right and ties their development directly to the growth of the shops.
The National Park Service later folded Altoona into the America’s Industrial Heritage Project. In that context, historian John C. Paige wrote A Special History Study: Pennsylvania Railroad Shops and Works, Altoona, Pennsylvania, a detailed narrative that traces how a single repair shed became a sprawling industrial complex and how that complex anchored the wider “Railroad City.”
From Repair Sheds to Locomotive Builder
During the 1850s and 1860s, the original repair shops gave way to larger and more specialized facilities. The complex that became known as the Altoona Machine Shops replaced the early buildings and introduced a greater degree of mechanization. In 1866 the shops produced their first complete locomotive, marking the moment when Altoona shifted from a place that repaired motive power to a place that built it.
As PRR traffic grew, the company added separate car shops, foundries, and a new locomotive facility at Juniata, a short distance up the valley. The shop complexes were laid out with roundhouses, erecting shops, boiler shops, powerhouses, pattern shops, and long bays where locomotives could be stripped and rebuilt. A bird’s-eye lithograph published in 1895 shows the density of those shop buildings and the maze of tracks that fed them, with ladders of sidings and transfer tables surrounding the core machine shops.
By the early twentieth century the Altoona Works had taken on its classic form. The East Altoona roundhouse, built in 1904, became one of the largest such structures in the world, servicing hundreds of locomotives per day from the Middle and Pittsburgh divisions. The Juniata Shops, in particular, developed into a complete locomotive plant that could handle everything from frame fabrication and boiler work to final assembly.
Production figures hint at the scale of what was happening along the shop tracks. The general overview on Altoona Works published in reference sources and enthusiast literature notes that 6,783 locomotives were manufactured in Altoona between 1866 and 1946. AltoonaWorks.info, a site that compiles construction rosters and shop diagrams, pushes that total above 7,000 units when Conrail- and Norfolk Southern-era work is included.
In addition to locomotives and cars, the shops turned out bridge components, turntables, signals, and countless smaller parts for PRR’s far-flung system. Historic American Engineering Record documentation on structures like the Church Road Bridge notes that they were fabricated at Altoona, reminding us that the works did more than supply motive power.
Innovation, Standardization, and the Motive Power Department
The physical plant tells only part of the story. A crucial piece lives in the paperwork of the Motive Power Department. Records preserved today at the Hagley Museum and Library include correspondence, reports, and technical documents that show how decisions were made about locomotive design, rebuilding programs, and shop assignments across the system. The department used Altoona as a kind of laboratory where new ideas could be tested and new classes refined before being rolled out elsewhere.
Paige’s special history study emphasizes this role. In his account, Altoona’s importance lies not just in the number of locomotives built but in the way the shops drove PRR’s broader push toward standardization. Motive Power Statistics printed in 1890 in Altoona listed not only locomotives repaired and constructed but also department responsibilities and the products manufactured in each shop. Those statistics, paired with construction rosters edited by Joseph D. Lovell from original Altoona records, allow historians to trace how experimental types gave way to standardized classes and how individual shops specialized in particular kinds of work.
Technical innovation fed into those efforts. The shop complexes incorporated power plants and boiler houses designed for steady, industrial-scale work. Testing laboratories examined materials and components, and shops experimented with new appliances, superheaters, and valve gear. HAER documentation for individual Juniata facilities preserves measured drawings and historical narratives for buildings such as Machine Shop No. 1 and the power plant. Read alongside the locomotive rosters and Motive Power Department correspondence, those records capture the ways engineers and shop forces worked together to keep the railroad modern.
Life and Work in a Railroad City
The shops did not operate in isolation. They formed the backbone of a company town whose rhythms were set by whistles, shift changes, and payrolls. Wallace’s Railroad City: Four Historic Neighborhoods in Altoona, Pennsylvania uses field surveys, photographs, and Sanborn fire insurance maps to reconstruct neighborhoods that grew up as housing for shop workers and their families.
Those Sanborn atlases, available today through the Library of Congress, show how rows of dwellings, boarding houses, and corner stores crowded along the rail lines and shop fences. Streets carried names that still echo through local memory, and each revision of the maps captures the expansion of buildings, sidings, and service facilities as the railroad boomed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
On the human side, the records of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers include items such as time claims for locomotive crane crews working inside Altoona Works in 1929. Those claims, preserved today in the Historic Pittsburgh digital collections, give a granular view of how crews moved between jobs and how work was logged and contested. They sit alongside broader union records that document safety concerns, wage disputes, and the constant negotiation between labor and management in a company town.
The lives that played out beyond the shop gates can be traced through local newspapers and obituaries. The Altoona Mirror covered shop expansions, accidents, strikes, and civic celebrations tied to the railroad. A digitized obituary collection at FamilySearch allows genealogists to cross-reference death notices with employee files and union records, building biographies of men and women whose daily work kept the locomotives moving.
War Work and the Peak of Production
The two world wars brought extraordinary pressure to Altoona. In addition to maintaining PRR’s own fleet, the shops were drawn into broader national defense work. During the First World War they kept troop trains and wartime freight moving. During the Second, the Juniata Shops in particular reached the peak of their locomotive output. AltoonaWorks.info’s timeline notes that 1943 was the single biggest year of new locomotive production at the works, with 111 locomotives completed at Juniata alone.
Photos from the University of Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Railroad Photographs Collection, along with official PRR images such as the 1903 view of the Altoona Machine Shops and roundhouse, show crews posed in front of lines of new engines or crowded inside cavernous shops under overhead cranes. These photographs remind us that the “Mechanical Marvel” was always a human undertaking, crowded with machinists, boilermakers, pattern makers, electricians, cleaners, and laborers.
The war years also strained the city around the works. Housing shortages, extended shifts, and wartime rationing reshaped family life. The broader coal and steel economy of southwestern Pennsylvania, examined in A Legacy of Coal: The Coal Company Towns of Southwestern Pennsylvania by Margaret M. Mulrooney, helps contextualize Altoona within a network of company towns that supplied and serviced the industrial war machine.
Dieselization, Decline, and Survival
After 1945 the ground under the Altoona Works began to shift. The railroad gradually retired steam in favor of diesel and electric locomotives, which required different kinds of maintenance and did not need frequent heavy overhauls in the way steam had. The shop forces adapted by rebuilding older diesels, fabricating parts, and shifting into new kinds of repair and modernization work, but the days of constant new locomotive construction were over.
Mergers and reorganizations intensified these changes. The collapse of the original PRR into Penn Central, the creation of Conrail, and eventually the rise of Norfolk Southern all left marks on the physical plant and the workforce. Some facilities were closed or repurposed; others, especially the Juniata complex, remained central. Today the site operates as the Juniata Locomotive Shop, a major locomotive repair and rebuilding center. Railway Age’s 2025 feature story “Mechanical Marvel” by Dan Cupper describes it as a roughly 70-acre complex that handles scheduled overhauls, wreck repairs, and capital upgrade programs, turning out rebuilt locomotives at about half the cost of buying new units.
Recent reporting on proposed railroad mergers notes that, even with a far smaller workforce than in the steam era, Juniata remains one of the largest locomotive repair facilities in North America and a critical economic anchor for the region. The landscape has changed, but the idea that Altoona is a railroad city has not vanished.
Preservation, Museums, and the Stories Workers Left Behind
If the shop grounds are the skeleton of Altoona’s railroad story, the modern preservation work gives that story a living voice. Since 1998 the Railroaders Memorial Museum has been housed in the former Master Mechanics Building, a PRR structure built in 1882 that once served as part of the shop complex itself. The museum’s mission is to preserve, honor, and celebrate the contributions of railroaders throughout central Pennsylvania, with exhibits that emphasize the daily routines and dangers of shop work and railroad operations.
The museum also serves as a key archival repository. Its “Altoona Works Employee Records, 1890–1980” collection preserves company files for generations of workers, while its “Call Board” database allows visitors and families to contribute information about individual railroaders. A 2025 guide to railroad genealogical resources highlights this employee records series as a central source for anyone tracing an Altoona shop worker’s career.
Elsewhere, the records of the Vice President of Altoona Works at the Pennsylvania State Archives, the Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission files at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and the Division of Transportation’s Railroad Reference Files at the National Museum of American History all preserve drafts, correspondence, and clippings created during the America’s Industrial Heritage Project and related preservation efforts.
Taken together, these museum and archival collections shift the focus from locomotives to people. Oral histories, personal artifacts, and photographs capture how machinists and clerks remembered the smell of cutting oil, the sound of overhead cranes, the feel of cinders in their clothes after a turn in the roundhouse. For Appalachia-focused historians, Altoona’s story fits alongside coal camps and mill towns as another example of how corporate power, industrial technology, and working-class communities reshaped the mountain borderlands of Pennsylvania.
How to Research the Altoona Works Today
Because the Altoona Works stood at the intersection of corporate power, engineering innovation, and community life, it generated an unusually layered paper trail. For anyone approaching the topic, a good path usually begins with the major published histories and then moves into archival and digital primary sources.
Paige’s A Special History Study: Pennsylvania Railroad Shops and Works, Altoona, Pennsylvania, produced for the National Park Service, remains the single best starting point for a narrative overview. It situates the shops within PRR’s system, explains how the complex grew, and includes appendices on shop organization and production. James J. D. Lynch Jr.’s long article “Overview of the History and Development of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Altoona Shops” in the journal of the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical and Historical Society, The Keystone, complements that study with detailed diagrams, photographs, and period quotations.
To understand Altoona as a company town as well as a shop complex, Wallace’s Railroad City study and Mulrooney’s A Legacy of Coal place Altoona within broader patterns of industrial community building in southwestern Pennsylvania.For the present day, Cupper’s “Mechanical Marvel” and local news features about the Railroaders Memorial Museum and Juniata Shops show how this heritage is being interpreted and contested in the twenty first century.
Primary source research then branches in several directions. Corporate records at Hagley (including the PRR Company Records, Motive Power Department files, and locomotive rosters), the Vice President of Altoona Works volumes at the Pennsylvania State Archives, and the AIHP files at Indiana University of Pennsylvania all preserve internal voices from management and engineers. The Railroaders Memorial Museum’s employee records and call-board database, paired with Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers materials and Altoona Mirror obituaries, open windows onto working-class lives.
Maps and images fill in the landscape. Sanborn fire insurance maps and the 1895 bird’s-eye view show the physical growth of the shop complexes and surrounding neighborhoods, while HAER documentation and photographic collections at the Library of Congress and Historic Pittsburgh offer visual sequences of shop interiors, roundhouses, and workers at their stations.
Finally, digital compilations such as AltoonaWorks.info, Trains-and-Railroads pages featuring Altoona-built locomotives, and the ExplorePAHistory historical marker essay provide quick access to rosters, timelines, and interpretive summaries that can guide deeper archival work.
For family historians and researchers across the Appalachian region, the Altoona Works story offers more than a tale of steel and steam. It provides a case study in how a railroad complex could give birth to a city, sustain generations of workers, and leave behind enough records that those lives can still be traced today, long after the last steam whistle faded against the Allegheny hills.
Sources & Further Reading
Paige, John C. Pennsylvania Railroad Shops and Works, Altoona, Pennsylvania. Special History Study. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1989. PDF. https://npshistory.com/publications/aih-sw-pa/pa-railroad-shops-works.pdf
Wallace, Kim E. Railroad City: Four Historic Neighborhoods in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Washington, DC: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, National Park Service, 1990. https://archive.org/details/railroadcityfour00wall
Mulrooney, Margaret M. A Legacy of Coal: The Coal Company Towns of Southwestern Pennsylvania. Washington, DC: America’s Industrial Heritage Project, Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission, 1990. PDF. https://npshistory.com/publications/aih-sw-pa/legacy-of-coal.pdf
Lynch, James J. D., Jr. “Overview of the History and Development of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Altoona Shops.” The Keystone 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 22–45. https://www.rrpicturearchives.net/locThumbs.aspx?id=110951
Treese, Lorett. Railroads of Pennsylvania: Fragments of the Past in the Keystone Landscape. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003. https://books.google.com/books?id=HxlkQUkXQPMC
Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Pennsylvania Railroad Company Records, 1835–1970. Manuscript collection 1998.142, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE. https://www.hagley.org/research/collections/pennsylvania-railroad-company-records-1835-1970
Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Locomotive Rosters Collection, 1834–1974. Manuscript collection 1999.224, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE. https://www.hagley.org/research/collections/locomotive-rosters-collection-1834-1974
Hagley Museum and Library. Pennsylvania Railroad Photograph Albums, 1905–1960. Collection 1988.231, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE. https://findingaids.hagley.org/1988-231
Historic American Engineering Record. “Altoona Car Shops, Fire Engine House No. 8, 201 Seventh Street, Altoona, Blair County, Pennsylvania.” HAER No. PA-230-A. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, n.d. https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.pa2673.photos/
Historic American Engineering Record. “Pennsylvania Railroad, Altoona Works, Machine Shop No. 1, Juniata Shops, Altoona, Blair County, Pennsylvania.” HAER, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, n.d. https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.pa2491.photos/
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Altoona, Blair County, Pennsylvania. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, January 1888. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn07496_001/
AltoonaWorks.info. “General History of the Railroad Shops in Altoona, PA.” Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.altoonaworks.info/history.html
AltoonaWorks.info. “Altoona-built: Construction Summary and Locomotive Lists.” Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.altoonaworks.info/built/aw-summary.html
AltoonaWorks.info. “Locomotive Rosters.” Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.altoonaworks.info/rosters/
AltoonaWorks.info. “Timeline of Railroad Events at Altoona, PA and Surroundings.” Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.altoonaworks.info/timeline.html
Railroaders Memorial Museum. “About the Railroaders Memorial Museum.” Railroaders Memorial Museum, Altoona, Pennsylvania. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.railroadcity.org/about
Sponholz, Jim. Internet Railroad Genealogical Resources. RailGenealogy, May 24, 2025. PDF. https://railgenealogy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/records-1.pdf
University of Pittsburgh Library System. “Pennsylvania Railroad Photograph Collection, 1895–1968.” Historic Pittsburgh. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://historicpittsburgh.org/collection/pennsylvania-railroad-photograph-collection-1895-1968
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Records, 1917–1980. AIS.1994.09, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System, Pittsburgh, PA. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt:US-PPiU-ais199409
FamilySearch. “Pennsylvania, Blair, Altoona Mirror Obituary Collection, 1960–1998.” FamilySearch Wiki. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Pennsylvania%2C_Blair%2C_Altoona_Mirror_Obituary_Collection_-_FamilySearch_Historical_Records
ExplorePAHistory.com. “Pennsylvania Railroad Shops.” Story behind the marker. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://explorepahistory.com/story.php?sr=1-2-23
ExplorePAHistory.com. “Railroaders Memorial Museum.” Story behind the marker. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-247
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. “The Pennsylvania Railroad.” ExplorePAHistory.com, Story Theme. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://explorepahistory.com/story.php?sr=1-2-22
Archives Center, National Museum of American History. “Division of Transportation Railroad Reference Files, 1830s–1990 (NMAH.AC.0523).” Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives. Accessed February 9, 2026. https://sova.si.edu/record/NMAH.AC.0523
Cupper, Dan. “Mechanical Marvel.” Railway Age, September 9, 2025. https://www.railwayage.com/news/mechanical-marvel/
“Altoona Works.” Wikipedia, last modified January 17, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altoona_Works
Author Note: As a railroad and coalfield historian working in the Appalachian borderlands, I am fascinated by towns that grew up around shop gates instead of courthouse squares. I hope this piece helps you see Altoona not just as a dot on a rail map but as a railroad city whose yards, records, and museums still hold the stories of thousands of Appalachian workers.