The Pennsylvania Railroad

Chartered in 1846 to link Philadelphia with the industrial west, the Pennsylvania Railroad grew into a colossus that called itself, without much exaggeration, the Standard Railroad of the World. By the early twentieth century it was the largest railroad in the country and, by some measures, the largest corporation on earth, with a budget that rivaled the federal government's and a workforce numbering in the hundreds of thousands. For a century the initials PRR stood for corporate power at its most immense.

The railroad's reach shaped the industrial heartland. Its lines carried the coal, iron, and steel of Pennsylvania to the mills and markets of the East, and its engineering feats — among them the great Horseshoe Curve that lifted trains over the Allegheny Mountains — became landmarks of American ambition. Its grand stations anchored the cities it served, and its logo, the keystone, was as familiar to travelers as any brand in the country.

Such size brought political weight and public suspicion in equal measure. Like the other great railroads of the Gilded Age, the Pennsylvania could make or break the towns and businesses along its tracks, and its rate-setting power helped provoke the first great wave of federal regulation of industry. It stood as a symbol of the era when railroads were the dominant force in the American economy, admired for their efficiency and feared for their control.

The automobile, the truck, and the airplane slowly undid the empire the rails had built. Bleeding traffic and money in the postwar decades, the Pennsylvania merged in 1968 with its old rival the New York Central to form Penn Central, which collapsed just two years later in what was then the largest bankruptcy in American history. From its wreckage rose Amtrak and Conrail, the public successors that carry on, in diminished form, what the Standard Railroad of the World once ruled.