Antique 1939 Pennsylvania Railroad Brochure 🚂 Modern Locomotives S-1 Steam For Sale

New Old Stock - a 1939 Pennsylvania Railroad booklet, unused since the day it came off the Pennsylvania Railroad

Quick correction before anything else: the locomotive glaring off the cover is not the booklet's famous S-1 duplex - that's the interior star, a few pages in. The cover engine is Class K-4s Streamlined, no. 3768, given its smooth Raymond Loewy shroud in February 1936 and nicknamed "The Torpedo" by PRR crews. Same bullet-nosed look as the S-1, different locomotive entirely, and it's the one that actually greets you first.

1939 was the year of the New York World's Fair, and this booklet was printed for a railroad that had real machinery on the fairgrounds to match its slogans. The cover's own K-4s 3768 was one of the Pennsylvania's showpieces there. So was the S-1 duplex pictured inside - fresh out of the Altoona shops that January, repainted "American Railroads" for the occasion, and set running continuously on a roller platform at 60 mph so fairgoers could watch a locomotive "run" without it going anywhere. It was later independently clocked at 100.97 mph, backing up the booklet's own claim that it was "capable of sustained speeds of more than 100 miles an hour." Only one S-1 was ever built; its size and rigid frame kept it mostly to the flat stretch between Chicago and Crestline, Ohio, and it was scrapped in 1949.

Inside, every locomotive gets its own photograph and a real specification block. The Class I-1s Decapod earned the nickname "Hippo" among PRR crews for its fat boiler and hauled the bulk of Pennsylvania freight until WWII. The Class E-6s Atlantic is the same class that, on June 11, 1927, pulled a train carrying a portable darkroom developing newsreel film of Charles Lindbergh's welcome-home celebrations - and beat a chartered airplane to the theaters. The Class L-1s Mikado picked up the nickname "Lollipops" somewhere along the way, a name that outlived any explanation of it. And two of the K-4s class's surviving sisters - not the cover's 3768 - were later named Pennsylvania's official state steam locomotives.

The booklet's cars get their own page too, including a horse express car lettered DEL MAR TURF CLUB - Bing Crosby's Southern California racetrack, which opened in 1937 and hosted the famous Seabiscuit-Ligaroti match race the following year. A separate photograph shows a shed full of GG-1 electric locomotive shells under construction, smooth and unriveted - the design Raymond Loewy pushed through after the very first GG-1 kept its riveted body and earned the nickname "Old Rivets." The inside back cover folds out into a full Pennsylvania system map, credited to Rand McNally & Co.'s New York office, a firm that had been printing railroad maps and timetables since the 1870s.

This is the 1939 printing, New Old Stock.