Road Trippin' PA: Horseshoe Curve

ALTOONA, Pa. (WJAC) — 6 News has kicked off our summer series “Road Trippin', giving you a chance to see some of the unique sites in our coverage area.

Our first trip is to the Horseshoe Curve which is a National Historic Landmark.

Below, the museum curator lays out all the new exhibits that were created during the pandemic.

The Curve opened up on February 15, 1854.

Before that, if you wanted to travel from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, you had to use the mainline of public works with the Allegheny Portage Railroad, here locally.

And that was a series of canal boats, inclined planes, and it was very time consuming.

For the 1850’s, this was pretty revolutionary.

The way they curved into the mountain to keep the incline low enough treat a heavy freight train to traverse it.

You go up to the top park there, and you can see where they cut into the Kittanning Point Mountian. You can see, pretty much, the rock face that, you know, in the 1850’s, someone and a group of people, they pretty much chiseled that away by hand. They didn’t use heavy machinery.

“The Red Arrow used to travel from Detroit to New York, and it would stop in Altoona on its way.

And on the Bennington Curve, which is kind of on the other side of the mountain from the Horseshoe Curve, near Gallitzin, in an early morning, the Red Arrow crashes.

Very gruesome passenger train wreck.

Twenty-four people passed away.

We kind of dedicated our vestibule area to the red arrow and the people who passed away.”

“One of the many plans that the Germans had against American was Operation Pastorius. And what they did was they took a few German individuals who had either grown up in the United States, or they had come over before the war for college. But they trained over in Germany, and basically became saboteurs skilled in explosives.

In 1942, eight of them came over to America with a hit list of targets -- a bunch of vital industry and then the Horseshoe Curve and the Juniata works in downtown, because during the war there was about 120 trains a day, on average.

But that number could go all the way up to about 250 trains a day.

It was such a vital link for not only passenger trains, but a lot of the wartime freight, you know, anything going to the east coast from the west coast has to travel, pretty much, on the curve.

Fortunately, right after they arrived in America, they pretty much wanted to turn themselves in, and hand themselves over to the FBI. The curve was placed under armed guard until the end of the war. We just made the exhibit on Pastorius with kind of like a uniform that a guard may have worn, from the army, while he was here guarding the curve.”

“And pretty much every president between Johnson and Eisenhower traveled on the Curve at one point. And then FDR, Franklin Roosevelt.

He stopped here at the Curve because the building that was here before what is up here today was built by the Works Progress Administration, one of his new deal programs.

And he actually stopped, he said a few remarks.

Basically, a little promo tour as it were. And the last one that we know of for sure was Jimmy Carter traveled on the Curve.”

“It’s pretty great to be part of this, because not only do you have like, you know, local people, who are interested in their heritage, coming here and learning things, but we even have people coming from all over the world, you know, they’re coming to the world famous Horseshoe Curve, and they’ve heard so much about it.”

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