Preserving the Voices Behind America’s Railroads
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Emma Halsey
Aired; January 21st, 2026.
When Matthew Wolfe walks through the Railroaders Memorial Museum in Altoona, he isn’t just surrounded by locomotives and artifacts, he’s surrounded by the lives of the people who built them.
Wolfe, a 2023 graduate of Penn State Altoona, became the museum’s curator after starting as an intern in 2022. His path wasn’t always aimed at museum work, but the moment he stepped behind the scenes, something clicked.
“Interning at a museum opened my eyes to a whole new perspective,” he says. “You’re not just reading history — you’re touching it. You’re feeling it come alive.”
A Museum Built for the Workers
Founded in 1980, the Railroaders Memorial Museum is unique among railroad museums. Instead of focusing solely on engines and equipment, it centers the people who powered the Pennsylvania Railroad, once the largest railroad in the world.
At its height, Altoona’s shops employed 17,000 workers, making it the largest train‑shop complex on the planet in the 1920s. The city’s identity was inseparable from the railroad: shift whistles set the rhythm of daily life, and soot from passing locomotives drifted into nearby homes.
Wolfe says that’s exactly why the museum exists.
“That’s 17,000 stories that could be lost to history,” he explains. “We want to make sure their voices are never forgotten.”
Engineering the Impossible: The Horseshoe Curve
One of Altoona’s most iconic landmarks, the Horseshoe Curve, was born out of necessity. The Allegheny Mountains posed a dangerous barrier to westward travel, and early solutions like the Allegheny Portage Railroad were slow and cumbersome.
In the 1850s, surveyor J. Edgar Thompson identified a way to carve a gradual, safe route along the mountain ridge. What followed was a feat of human endurance: Irish laborers spent three years carving the curve by hand, using only pickaxes, shovels, and dynamite in unpredictable mountain weather.
The result became one of the eight engineering marvels of the world.
Today, thousands of visitors come to see the Horseshoe Curve each year — and their admission helps preserve the site for future generations.
