Altoona Railroaders Memorial Museum

The Pennsylvania Railroad was incorporated in 1846 and immediately began the task of finding an all-rail route to connect Philadelphia with Pittsburgh. The Pennsylvania Railroad surveyed possible routes and arrived on a valley floor at the base of the Allegheny Mountains in 1849 that was primarily occupied by the David Robeson farm. As people arrived for employment opportunities, the railroad company purchased the Robeson farm, laid out the plan of a town, and named it Altoona. Shops were established, and crafts were needed as locomotive and car design and building evolved, all with increasing population and prosperity. Altoona grew from farmland to 75,000 people in 75 years.

Great Railroad Museums of the USA is a guide for the devoted railfan. It details the sixty-seven largest, most interesting and most important railroad museums in the country, which are classified into good, really good, great and really great groups. Individually the museums are discussed and highlights of their collections are listed. All are rated on their size, the rarity and antiquity of their collections, the quality of their work, the scope of their collections and their presentation to the public. The book is indexed and a map shows the museum's geographic locations. A special index lists more than a hundred-sixty especially interesting cars and locomotives and describes where they can be found; ninety photographs provide illustration. Bonus chapters list and describe the six best museum rail rides in the country and nineteen instances of significant rail preservation outside of traditional railroad museums.

Regional histories of the great railroads and relics of rail culture.

A guidebook to the museum in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, covering the history of the state's railroad industry, with a tour of the 100,000-square-foot exhibit hall, which displays dozens of historic locomotives and rolling stock significant to Pennsylvania's railroad heritage. A complete checklist of the museum's collection of rolling stock is included.