Today's #WorkerWednesday excursion takes us to the Pennsylvania Railroad's yards in Altoona, Pennsylvania. This negative, created on March 14, 1919, shows a railroad employee staffing a bolt threading machine in the eastbound repair yard.
This item is part of Hagley Library'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.
This collection of more than 5,200 negatives from the official Pennsylvania Railroad files largely depict PRR 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 PRR for reference.
The negatives int this collection have been digitized to positives for online access. Most of the digital images in our Digital Archive from this collection are black and white, low resolution copies produced from the original negatives. Click here to view them online now.