When was the horseshoe curve built

Engineers were able to safely lay railroad tracks through most of the mountainous terrain. Five miles 8 km west of the city of Altoona, Pennsylvania, the terrain became too steep. Railroad engineers debated on the best way to proceed to Altoona. A tunnel through the mountains would have been expensive and taken many years to construct. To build railroad tracks over the mountains would have required unsafe increases in elevation.

For a train to travel safely, the elevation grade of the tracks cannot exceed 1. More adventures in The Alleghenies. Lincoln Caverns. Coal Country Brewing. Golden Eagle Inn. Raystown Lake Recreation Area. Related Articles View All Articles. Although the State Works improved east-west transportation, the system was defective. Traffic jams developed at the locks.

The canals froze in the winter and flooded in the spring. Travel over the mountains in boats on flatbed railcars, pulled first by mules and then stationary steam engines, was lengthy and hazardous. Consequently, forward-looking Pennsylvanians sought a better means of traversing the state.

In , a convention to urge the construction of a continuous railroad from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh assembled in Harrisburg and appointed Charles Schlatter to survey the route. He recommended a route that ran along the Juniata River in the east and the Conemaugh in the west. They became the major sections of the Pennsylvania Railroad's main line. In slightly more than a decade, the eastern section of the railroad reached Duncansville, just beyond Hollidaysburg. The western portion was completed to a point near Johnstown in Nevertheless, to cross the mountains, passengers and freight still depended on the slow and dangerous state-owned Allegheny Portage Railroad.

Chief engineer and later president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, John Edgar Thomson, raised the funds and designed the solution to the problem which was to lay tracks on which trains could cross the mountains directly. In order to construct this line, Thomson hired Irish laborers from Counties Cork, Mayo and Antrim who lived in camps along the way.

They worked with the only tools available at that time - picks and shovels - to cut away the front of a mountain to form a ledge on which they could place the tracks that appear in the image by William T. Purviance made around Further throwing Horseshoe Curve into the spotlight, the Sylvania Electric Company took a series of spectacular night photos for publicity purposes in the early s.

By that time, some 25, freight trains and 2 million passengers a year traveled around the Curve, according to the PRR. Thousands of people from all over the world were visiting the Curve every year. This popularity was temporary, though. By the late s, some of the luster of the Curve was beginning to fade.

With the onset of the more efficient diesel engines, steam engines were being phased out of the PRR, meaning layoffs for the railroad unions and hard workers of railroad towns. Because of this, when one of the old steam engines was put on display in the summer of , the ceremony was interrupted by picketers, protesting that the actions of the PRR were unnecessarily cruel.

By December, steam operations were shut down—the Horseshoe Curve would never be the same again. Various efforts were mounted to maintain and improve the property, but no person, group, agency or company seemed to want take full responsibility. Economic shifts, combined with massive federal and state taxpayer-funded subsidies to the competing highway and aviation modes, left many railroads on the ropes.

Penn Central Railroad the PRR combined with its old rival, New York Central went bankrupt in , and with the federal transportation policy favoring planes and automobiles, the passenger-train was nearly extinct. This saved the passenger-train, but cut the number of passenger runs from the 60 or more a day that had been routine in the s and 30s to only It was only four by By , the federal government revamped the freight train system as well by merging all of the failing northeastern railroads into a new government-owned freight line, Conrail.

This brought more traffic to the Curve, but in order to support the freight line, the passenger-trains were cut even further. There were just two daily runs—one each way—from New York to Chicago.

There had never been so little passenger service on the Horseshoe Curve, not even when it opened in It was extended to New York as well in , and eventually became the most successful state-supported passenger service in the nation. Conrail did some economizing as the 80s began, using less parallel tracks. Several more improvements were made on the Curve and other tracks, including the use of welded rails that allowing for expansion and contraction.

In June , the Horseshoe Curve regained some of its regard. The National Park Service rangers began riding the Pennsylvanian between Altoona and Johnstown several days a week during the summer to give interpretive talks about the history and geography of the area and its transportation systems, past and present. The program became so popular that people rode on those days just to hear the narration, and it has been repeated in following seasons.