naming it for Samuel Rea, born in town in
1855 and the railroad’s president from
1913 to 1925; Rea led the Pennsylvania
Station and Hell Gate Bridge projects in
New York City. By its sheer size, the car-
shop made a suitable monument to Rea: a
half-mile long and enclosing 750,000
square feet (more than 17 acres). Although
Norfolk Southern sold it in 2006, the site
continues to host freight-car rebuilding
and other rail-related activity; Curry Rail
Services, the major tenant, fabricated the
cab and prow for the reproduction Pennsy
T1 now under construction.
Modern U.S. 220 bypasses downtown
Altoona; the old route followed Sixth Ave-
nue, just a few blocks from the Pennsylva-
nia Railroad main line and shops. Photog-
rapher Don Wood called Altoona, “The
mystical, magical, Mecca of steam!” The
Altoona Works built 6,783 locomotives for
the Pennsy between 1866 and 1946 —
almost as many as Lima did in its whole
history; the Works also built and main-
tained hundreds of thousands of freight
and passenger cars from the 1850s onward.
At its peak in the 1920s, the 218-acre site
had more than 125 buildings, and more
than 16,000 people worked there during
World War II.
Wood wrote, “They say you never saw
the full, bright rays of the sun in Altoona
because of the dense smoke pall that con-
stantly hung over the city.” The East Altoona
roundhouse has long since vanished — even
a satellite view shows barely a trace of it —
but one can still easily find the location of
the ready tracks where, Wood said “[t]he
cinders from some 10,000 locos over the
span of 100 years make the ground feel as if
you were walking on a sandy beach.” Today
nothing, not even weeds, will grow, 60 years
after the last steam engine simmered there.
Norfolk Southern uses many of the remain-
ing Works buildings as the system’s main
locomotive repair facility, also performing
contract work for other railroads. A mile
away, the Railroaders Memorial Museum
occupies the former Master Mechanic’s
Building and a newly built seven-stall
roundhouse right across the tracks from the
Amtrak station. NS sends dozens of trains
through the mountains, around world-
famous Horseshoe Curve and into Altoona
every 24 hours, but no cloud of smoke
hangs over the city to obscure the sun.
The highway and railroad both run
down the broad and straight valley of the
Juniata River as far as Tyrone, where the
river and the Pennsy’s Broad Way turn to
the east; the superhighway continues
northeasterly along Bald Eagle Mountain,
with the old road and a former Pennsy sec-
ondary line — now the Nittany & Bald Ea-
gle Railroad, part of the North Shore Sys-
tem — in the valley. At Milesburg, U.S. 220
joins Interstate 80, then at Lamar strikes off
on its own upgraded alignment through a
gap in the ridge to reach Lock Haven and
the Susquehanna River. A few miles east of
there, we reach Avis, where the New York
Central had a large facility to maintain
equipment used on its coal branches —
about as out-of-the-way a corner of the
Central as one could find. The Central’s
Pennsylvania Division left the Water Level
Route at Lyons, N.Y., and dropped almost
straight south to reach the mines. The shop
built and repaired thousands of hopper
cars and maintained locomotives as well,
including the 2-6-6-2s that pulled and
pushed coal trains northward, through the
so-called Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania.
One of Avis’ shop buildings became part of
a steel mill in 1938, and it remains in useby Jersey Shore Steel, which heats and re-
rolls retired railroad rails into fence posts,
vineyard trellis stakes, and other products.
Twenty miles farther, and a quarter-
mile from today’s 220 on the west side of
Williamsport, the Reading Co. reached its
westernmost extent and its interchange
with the New York Central at Newberry
Yard. The Pennsylvania Railroad had access
to Newberry via the “City Line” branch of
its Buffalo Line, and until its 1942 aban-
donment the Susquehanna & New York
also came to town, on Pennsy trackage
rights on the Elmira Branch from the
north. None of these railroads had exten-
sive shop facilities in Williamsport, but the
Lycoming Valley Railroad, now owner of
the large and still-active Newberry Yard,
has built a two-track enginehouse there
where it maintains the North Shore’s fleet
of EMD switchers, Geeps, and SD40s.
East of Williamsport we parallel the Ly-
coming Valley’s former Reading track as faras Pennsdale, where U.S. 220 peels off for
its last 75-mile leg. From Pennsdale to
Dushore we follow the long-gone William-
sport & North Branch, a lumber-hauling
short line that threw in the towel in 1937.
For most of its last 20 miles, 220 runs
close to the Susquehanna River and the
Lehigh Railway, a short line that operates a
56-mile segment of the former Lehigh
Valley Railroad main. It interchanges with
Norfolk Southern at Sayre, Pa., at the edge
of a largely abandoned yard where once,
on more than 100 acres, the Valley assem-
bled and classified freight trains. It also
built and maintained thousands of freight
cars and maintained hundreds of locomo-
tives, even building steam locomotives
from scratch in its backshops as late as- A single building called “the big
shops” measured 360 feet by 747 feet —
known locally as the largest building in the
world at the time of its construction in - Conrail shuttered it and then tore it
down in the late 1980s. A few original Val-
ley shop buildings survive, one occupied by
GE Railcar Repair Services, and a pipeline
company uses some of the acreage for stor-
age; the local medical center bases its heli-
copters on the large round concrete pad
where the roundhouse stood. The Lehigh
Valley station, a lovely High Victorian
Gothic structure built in 1881 and now
owned by the Sayre Historical Society, sits
across the tracks. Two miles away, U.S. 220
reaches Interstate 86 (also known as New
York Route 17, the Southern Tier Express-
way) and comes to an end.
Over more than a century and a half of
evolution, the region through which U.S.
220 runs went from wilderness to frontier
to an interconnected landscape with an
identifiable character, even as local culture
and color vary. In the 21st century, many of
the places along that corridor have lost
their Industrial Age vitality — and even, in
Keyser, almost all traces of it, to cite the
most extreme example. But the history re-
mains. Hankey believes Route 220 warrants
consideration as a heritage corridor: “The
connection among these places has van-
ished from the national economy, but they
have a significant shared railroad history,
and significant railroad preservation
happens in many of them.”
Does any other American highway more
deserve the moniker “Railfan Road?” If you
know of one, let me hear from you. 2
OREN B. HELBOK lives in central Pennsyl-
vania, a few miles from U.S. 220. This is his
fourth Trains byline.TrainsMag.com 49“THE CINDERS FROM SOME
10,000 LOCOS OVER THE
SPAN OF 100 YEARS MAKE
THE GROUND FEEL AS IF
YOU WERE WALKING ON
A SANDY BEACH.”
— DON WOOD, PHOTOGRAPHER12 The Railroaders Memorial Museum in downtown Altoona, Pa. 13 Flying American flags, East Broad Top 2-8-2 No. 15 leads an excursion
north on July 4, 2010. Two photos, Alex Mayes 14 Everett Railroad 2-6-0 No. 11 switches the interchange yard in Hollidaysburg, Pa., in March 2016.
Oren B. Helbok 15 Nittany & Bald Eagle train No. 4 crosses the Little Juniata River in Tyrone, Pa., with North Shore power in August 2015. Dustin Faust
16 Coal-hauler Lehigh Valley maintained shops at Sayre, Pa., seen in January 1975. The city anchors the north end of U.S. 220. Richard W. Story