This image of a woman working in the Pennsylvania Railroad's tin shop was scanned from a negative created 105 years ago this week ...

Black and white image from 1919 of a woman at work in the Pennsylvania Railroad's tin shop.

This image of a woman working in the Pennsylvania Railroad's tin shop was scanned from a negative created 105 years ago this week, on March 11, 1919.

The negative is part of Hagley's Pennsylvania Railroad negative collection (Accession 1993.300). Incorporated in 1846, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company became the largest railroad in the United States in terms of corporate assets and traffic from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century.

The Pennsylvania Railroad negatives collection contains more than 5,200 negatives from the official Pennsylvania Railroad files, which largely document the company's trains, tracks, equipment, and facilities. The collection also contains numerous views of similar facilities and equipment on other railroads, of nearby buildings and properties, or of standardized equipment and accessories that were collected by the Pennsylvania Railroad for reference.

The negatives in this digital collection were digitized to positives for online access. Most of the digital images seen here are black-and-white, low resolution copies produced from the original negatives. To view the collection online now in our Digital Archives, click here. To learn more about the lives of the Pennsylvania Railroad's women workers, click here to find our collection of Pennsylvania Railroad women workers' oral histories (Accession 1998.234).