Uploaded April 2011 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The Pennsylvania Railroad (reporting mark PRR) was an American Class I railroad, founded in 1846. Commonly referred to as the "Pennsy", the PRR was headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The PRR was the largest railroad by traffic and revenue in the U.S. throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and was at one time the largest publicly traded corporation in the world. At its peak, it controlled about 10,000 miles (16,000 km) of rail line; in the 1920s it carried about three times the traffic (measured by ton-miles of freight) as other railroads of comparable length, such as Union Pacific or Santa Fe. The only rival was New York Central, which carried around three-quarters of PRR's ton-miles.
During its history, the PRR merged with or had an interest in at least 800 other rail lines and companies.[1] The corporation still holds the record for the longest continuous dividend history: it paid out annual dividends to shareholders for more than 100 years in a row.[2] At one point the budget for the PRR was larger than that of the U.S. government; at its peak it employed about 250,000 workers.[3]
The Pennsylvania Railroad (reporting mark PRR) was an American Class I railroad, founded in 1846. Commonly referred to as the "Pennsy", the PRR was headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The PRR was the largest railroad by traffic and revenue in the U.S. throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and was at one time the largest publicly traded corporation in the world. At its peak, it controlled about 10,000 miles (16,000 km) of rail line; in the 1920s it carried about three times the traffic (measured by ton-miles of freight) as other railroads of comparable length, such as Union Pacific or Santa Fe. The only rival was New York Central, which carried around three-quarters of PRR's ton-miles.
During its history, the PRR merged with or had an interest in at least 800 other rail lines and companies.[1] The corporation still holds the record for the longest continuous dividend history: it paid out annual dividends to shareholders for more than 100 years in a row.[2] At one point the budget for the PRR was larger than that of the U.S. government; at its peak it employed about 250,000 workers.[3]
![Chesapeake & Ohio George Washington Passenger Train [4K]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fGzqAaMwu1M/mqdefault.jpg "Chesapeake & Ohio George Washington Passenger Train [4K]
The George Washington was a named passenger train of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway running on a route between Cincinnati, Ohio and Washington, D.C.It began service in 1932 to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of the first president of the United States. When the George Washington was inaugurated as C&Os top-notch train on April 30, 1932, it was one of only two all-air-conditioned, long-distance trains operating in America. (the other was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroads Capitol Limited, which was instituted as an all-air-conditioned train only a week or so before the George Washington. New equipment was not built for this train; instead, older cars that were completely refurbished by Pullman and by C&O shops. It was still a few years before the streamliner craze, so C&O persisted with the standards of the time using its solid, heavy cars. The Pullman Company normally lettered its sleepers in a standardized fashion so that they could be interchanged and routed in any train in the United States with some uniformity, but there were some name trains to which specific cars were assigned on a regular basis, and C&Os George Washington was one of these. They differed from the standard Pullman sleepers in that they had the name of the train at the center of the letterboard where PULLMAN was usually placed, while the word PULLMAN was relocated to the end of the letterboard in small letters")
