Pitcairn: The Yard That Ran Pittsburgh's Freight

The borough of Pitcairn, tucked into the Turtle Creek valley east of Pittsburgh, was not born from settlers or surveyors. It was summoned into existence by one of the most powerful railroads in American history. And the thing that summoned it was freight.

Before the Pennsylvania Railroad arrived, this stretch of Turtle Creek was farmland. In eighteen seventy-four, the railroad bought two hundred fifteen acres along the valley. By eighteen eighty, superintendent Robert Pitcairn, the man the town would be named for, had ordered construction of a classification yard on that land. When the yard opened, it was built to handle the entire freight operation of the Pennsylvania Railroad's Pittsburgh Division, sorting cars heading east toward Philadelphia and cars heading west toward Ohio and beyond.

The scale that emerged was staggering. The completed facility included receiving yards, classification yards, two roundhouses, repair shops, machine shops, a lumber yard, and its own power plant. By the early nineteen hundreds, everything that moved by rail through Pittsburgh's freight network passed through Pitcairn. The yard eventually grew to cover the full two hundred fifty acres, making it one of the largest classification yards on the entire Pennsylvania Railroad system. At one point, operators claimed it was the largest in the world.

The yard reached its zenith in the Second World War. More than two hundred trains moved through Pitcairn every single day during the war years, carrying troops, ammunition, steel, machinery, and the manufactured output of Pittsburgh's mills toward the coasts and the fronts beyond. The Pennsylvania Railroad was often called the Standard Railroad of the World, and Pitcairn was the engine behind that claim in western Pennsylvania.

Decline came with the postwar contraction of American rail freight. In January nineteen sixty-seven, the Pennsylvania Railroad shut down major operations at the Pitcairn yards. The tracks that once sorted the wealth of an industrial nation were eventually redeveloped as an intermodal facility. The borough today is small and quiet, its streets still laid out around a yard that shaped its reason for being.