The Pennsylvania Railroad: When Harrisburg Ran Everything
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
For roughly a century, beginning in the eighteen forties, Harrisburg was one of the most important rail hubs in the United States, and the Pennsylvania Railroad was, for much of that time, the most powerful corporation in America. Those two facts are not separate stories. They are the same story.
The Pennsylvania Railroad traces its founding to an eighteen forty-six charter granted by the state legislature, authorizing a line from Harrisburg west to Pittsburgh. Construction began right here, in Harrisburg, where it connected to the existing Philadelphia-to-Harrisburg route, then pushed through the Allegheny Mountains. The original portion of the Harrisburg station opened on November twenty-third, eighteen eighty-seven, Queen Anne in style, built to handle a volume of passengers that would have seemed impossible to the ferry traders of a generation earlier.
From Harrisburg, main rail lines radiated outward: north to Erie and Buffalo, south to Baltimore and Washington, east to Philadelphia and Jersey City, west toward Pittsburgh and Chicago. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad was not merely running trains through Harrisburg. It was, according to historians of the period, effectively controlling the state legislature that met here. The company's political reach extended into every committee and every gubernatorial race.
The railroad era reshaped Harrisburg's neighborhoods, drawing in workers from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, filling the rowhouses that still line the numbered streets. The station itself still operates today as an Amtrak stop, the historic building preserved and in use. Stand on the platform and you are standing where the mechanics of a continent passed through, coal and steel and soldiers and mail, all of it moving through this station on a timetable the Pennsylvania Railroad kept.
