Baldwin Locomotive Works: Seventy Thousand Engines
Near Wilmington, Pennsylvania
The site near Eddystone, Pennsylvania, where the Delaware County landscape opens toward the river, was once home to the largest locomotive manufacturer in the history of the world. Baldwin Locomotive Works built more than seventy thousand steam engines over one hundred and twenty-five years, and it started because a jeweler got curious about steam.
Matthias W. Baldwin began his career making jewelry in Philadelphia. He drifted into bookbinding, and then into precision machinery, and in eighteen thirty-one he built his first locomotive, a small demonstrator engine he called Old Ironsides. It ran on the Philadelphia, Germantown and Norriton Railroad on November twenty-third, eighteen thirty-two, and it worked so well that orders began arriving from railroads across the country.
Baldwin moved the company to a sprawling two-hundred-acre complex in North Philadelphia, and it was not nearly enough. By the Civil War, Baldwin was supplying locomotives to the Union Army by the hundreds. By the late eighteen hundreds, virtually every railroad in America ran at least some Baldwin power. The company employed thousands of workers in a neighborhood that grew up entirely around its factory gates.
In nineteen oh six, Baldwin moved again, consolidating to a new six-hundred-acre facility here in Eddystone. Production peaked in the nineteen teens, when the plant was turning out more than two thousand six hundred locomotives a year. During the First World War, the output doubled. During the Second World War, Baldwin built tanks alongside locomotives.
But the age of steam was ending. Diesel engines were cheaper to operate and easier to maintain. Baldwin tried to adapt, merging with rival Lima-Hamilton in nineteen fifty, but the transition came too late. The plant suspended locomotive production in nineteen fifty-six and closed permanently in nineteen seventy-two. What had been the mightiest engine factory on earth became vacant lots, a cautionary monument to the distances between invention and adaptation.
