Nazi saboteur Richard Quirin
kicked off his shoes, sat back in his New York City hotel room, and lit
up a Lucky Strike, one of the American cigarettes he had missed so much while
he was in Germany. He intently studied his map of the Altoona, PA region and
his target: the famous Horseshoe Curve on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
If all went well, he would soon retrieve the explosives that
he and his fellow agents brought ashore from the submarine and buried in
waterproof bags on a Long Island Beach. He would pack them into the extra large
suitcases he bought in a shop in Brooklyn, and travel by rail to Altoona. There,
he would strategically plant and detonate them destroying a unique and vital American
transportation line that, since 1854, served as a key link for freight and
passenger trains traversing the Allegheny Mountains.
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| Richard Quirin |
Quirin was part of a 1942 German plan to destroy important American
infrastructure and manufacturing sites like locks and dams on the Ohio River,
hydro-electric facilities at Niagara Falls, Alcoa aluminum plants, and
Horseshoe Curve. The mission was called Operation Pastorious.
His target, Horseshoe Curve, is an engineering marvel that
has fascinated railroaders, passengers and tourists who journeyed to the region
to see monster trains pass by ever since it was opened before the Civil War. East
and westbound trains traverse the curve that bends around a dam, a lake, and two
ravines. For every 100 feet, the tracks
at the Horseshoe Curve bend nine degrees with the entire curve totaling
220 degrees. The curve is
2,375 feet long and, at its widest, about 1,300 feet across. People on a
train rounding the curve can look out one side of their windows and see cars in
the same train on a parallel course.
During World War II, troops, munitions, and war products
from hundreds of manufacturers were transported on the Pittsburgh to Philadelphia
line. More than 50 passenger trains a day passed over the curve with a similar
number of freight trains.
Operation Pastorious planners targeted the curve for
destruction to disrupt rail traffic and America’s East Coast war effort. But
the best laid plans of secret Nazis often went awry. Quirin never got to finish
his smoke or further study his attack map. Unbeknownst to the German, two of
his co-conspirators turned themselves in and ratted out the other agents.
Before Quirin could get started on his Horseshoe Curve attack, or even finish
that cigarette, the FBI knocked on his door. Operation Pastorious was snuffed
out like Quirin’s Lucky Strike once the G-Men burst in and took him into
custody. He and seven other German agents were tried. All were convicted and
six, including Quirin, were executed in the electric chair.
So Horseshoe Curve remained a vital artery in the nation’s
wartime rail transportation network, safe from the saboteur’s explosives and
Hitler’s grand plan to destroy America from the inside. The line survived the
war, the switch from steam to diesel engines, and changes in the way Americans
move their people and freight. Passenger trains dwindled with the advent of air
travel and 18-wheelers took a chunk out of the freight business once interstate
highways created quicker more direct connections.
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| View from the park at Horseshoe Curve |
However, if you stand today in the clean well-groomed park
that sits in the middle of Horseshoe Curve, you would have a difficult time
believing that there could be even more rail traffic than there is today. Every
15 minutes or so, seven days a week, huge diesel engines pull massive trains in
both directions around the rails that seem to encircle close-up observers.
Engineers blast their whistles and wave vigorously at the
tourists who ride the short steep funicular from the parking area and museum
below or take a set of long steps to the observation area/park. Instead of
boxcars, coaches, and dining cars, today’s engines pull mostly flatcars loaded
to capacity with aluminum containers that, not long before, sat on the decks of
Trans-Atlantic ocean freighters. They are mostly Chicago bound from ports on
the East coast.
According to Norfolk Southern Railroad, the current owners
of the line, 111.8 million short tons of freight are moved over Horseshoe Curve
every year. Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian
between Pittsburgh and New York City rumbles by once a day every day. Freight
trains roll around the curve at 30 miles per hour. Freight trains make it at 41
miles per hour.
Amid the noise of the trains and the playful yelling of
visiting children who are fascinated by the appearances of the huge engines, it
is difficult but not impossible to imagine the magnitude of the building
project that made it all possible.
For three years, beginning in 1850, a 450-man work crew,
made up almost entirely of Irishmen who fled the starvation caused by the
potato blight in their home country, used only picks, shovels, and horses
pulling flatbeds called drags to shape the mountainside to accommodate the
railroad. The work had to be backbreaking, insufferably hot in the summers, and
incredibly cold in the winter. They were paid about 25 cents an hour for a
12-hour day.
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| John Edgar Thompson |
John Edgar Thomson, a civil engineer and industrialist, was
the designer of Horseshoe Curve. He eventually presided over the Pennsylvania
Railroad’s growth into the largest business enterprise in the world in his day
and was famous for his technological and managerial innovation. Andrew Carnegie,
who started his career as a clerk with the Pennsylvania Railroad, was such a
fan of his old boss that he named his sprawling steel plant in Braddock, PA
after him—the Edgar Thomson Steel Works.
The entire line between Altoona and Johnstown, including
Horseshoe Curve, opened on February 15, 1854. The total cost for that 31.1
miles of track was $2.4 million or $80,000 per mile. Eventually, so many trains
were using the line that three additional tracks were added by 1900.
The engineering and historical significance of Horseshoe
Curve was recognized in 1966 when it was designated a National Historic
Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was
designated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American
Society of Civil Engineers in 2004.
Any trip to see the big trains at Horseshoe Curve should
include a stop at the Railroaders
Memorial Museum in Altoona, where, at one time, more than 1,600 people were
employed at the Pennsylvania Railroad’s sprawling repair, maintenance and
locomotive construction facilities.
As the museum makes clear, Altoona was a town built by
railroaders for railroaders and its displays offer a rare glimpse into a
transportation industry that has all but vanished. It disappeared partly
because today’s diesel train engines do not require the frequent maintenance
that the old steam engines needed. The museum does a great job of explaining
how locomotives were refurbished by first dipping them in their entirety in a
vat of lye; how 80-inch drive wheels for train engines were cast in maintenance
shops; how crews called “gandy dancers” built and maintained 26,000 miles of
track, tunnels and stations; and why wreck crews remained on alert for frequent
accidents.
Visits to Horseshoe Curve and the museum at Altoona are
worthwhile day trips for folks interested in trains past and present,
transportation history, or a visit to a famous candy factory—
Click on the video below to see what it is like when a big freight train comes through Horseshoe Curve.
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