About This Company

The Pennsylvania Railroad Company was the largest railroad in the United States in terms of corporate assets and traffic from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the decline of the northeast's and midwest's dominance of manufacturing, caused by the evolution of the interstate highway system and the advancements in air transportation. Originally created by Philadelphia merchants in 1846, it sought to build a trunk route from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh via the Allegheny Mountains to compete for freight traffic that by-passed Pennsylvania for New York via the Erie Canal. From those humble beginnings, it stretched into an 11,000 mile system running through New York, Washington, Chicago, and Saint Louis before reaching its final destination in 1970 in bankruptcy court. In the ensuing years, the Penn Central Corporation's holdings (created by a 1968 merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads), along with a number of other bankrupt railroads in the northeast were split between the federally-created National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) for passenger rail assets and the Consolidated Rail Corporation (ConRail) for freight traffic assets. The remaining local rail routes were divided between respective regional transportation authorities.