(orchestral music) - This is the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.

We opened to the public for the first time on April 22nd, 1975, but the idea for the Railroad Museum itself goes back much further.

It was actually created by act of the Pennsylvania Legislature, Act 451 in 1963.

The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania has been here for quite a long time.

All of these trains, whether they're locomotives, passenger cars, freight cars, each one of them tells a story.

They tell the story of not only the people who rode them if it's a passenger car, but they also tell the stories of the people who built them, the people in the shops, the people in the foundries, the people who operated the equipment when it was running on the rails, the people who worked for the railroad.

So they have, each one of them has a set of amazing stories to tell.

We can tell many, many stories here at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.

1223 is kind of an American star.

It was featured in a couple of Hollywood productions.

The musical "Hello, Dolly," it's in the very opening credits.

You can see the train roll into town.

That locomotive was also featured in the Broadway Limited, came out 1941, I believe.

Our Pennsylvania railroad, what's called an instruction car.

It's basically a classroom for teaching engineers, brakemen, conductors, firemen how to maintain service and make repairs on the go.

So it's literally a portable classroom that could be coupled to a train and taken anywhere in the system.

- By 1854, you could travel from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia by rail in a day.

By 1945, the Pennsylvania Railroad is the largest corporation in the world.

Its tracks extended from Montauk, the east end of Long Island, as far west as St. Louis, as far south as Norfolk, Virginia along with Cincinnati and Louisville, to Peoria, to Chicago, to Mackinaw in the northern tip of the southern part of Michigan, Toledo, to Detroit, to Cleveland, to Buffalo all over the northeastern part of the United States.

It was just absolutely huge.

The Pennsylvania Railroad, it wants to build a super fast streamlined modern electric locomotive to get from New York to Washington, and it did.

That was called the GG1.

It could pull a train of 18 cars a hundred miles an hour.

The GG1 ruled the roost from New York down to Washington DC, and West to Pittsburgh.

The T1 was a very innovative engine because it looked kind of like a rocket.

It actually was called a sharknose because the way it was designed, you could see a shark nose on the front of it, but the thing looked gorgeous, and you had a whole lot of machinery flying on the side of that thing as it went by, typically doing a hundred miles an hour or better, and it's great because they could move a heavy train very, very quickly.

(light jazz music) - [Train Announcer] Train number 28, the Broadway Limited for Crestline, Pittsburgh, Altoona, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Newark, and New York.

- [Douglas O'Brien] The Broadway Limited was among the most luxurious trains in the world.

Food was wonderful.

The service was wonderful.

Wanna drink in the bar car?

There were actually two of them, one at the front and one at the back, and it was an enormously popular train after World War II.

The most notable decline in rail service in this country was in the passenger train.

Stations deteriorate and become abandoned.

(melancholic piano music) You have whole yards next to the track with nothing but rusting equipment, locomotives and passenger cars.

You would see strings of T1s all lined up, rusting.

Every single T1 was scrapped.

None of them were saved.

People love to travel on the train because of the romance, because of the adventure.

So by 1968, it's virtually gone.

- [Patrick Morrison] This museum is always in motion, always looking to the future and how we can best preserve that historic railroad equipment.

There is that sort of kid-like childlike sense of wonder that you never outgrow.

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