When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
What did "tomorrow" look like in the last summer before the war? 🚂
There's a very particular flavor of American optimism baked into 1939. The World's Fair was rising out of the marshland at Flushing Meadows with its promise of "The World of Tomorrow." Detroit was dreaming up shapes nobody had a name for yet. And the Pennsylvania Railroad — by then the largest transportation company on the face of the earth — was handing out a modest little paper booklet to show the traveling public just how far modern engineering had come. That's exactly what you're looking at here: an original 1939 Pennsylvania Railroad company publication, never a reprint, never a museum reproduction — the genuine article the railroad itself printed and put into circulation that year.
Modern Locomotives and Cars 1939 is a Pennsylvania Railroad promotional booklet, small and oblong in format, measuring approximately 7½ x 5 inches (about 19 x 12.7 cm) and running to a modest number of pages, illustrated throughout with black-and-white halftone photography paired with letterpress specification text. The cover is a striking piece of period graphic design in its own right — a dramatic, head-on photograph of a streamlined Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive bearing directly at the camera, its bullet nose and PRR keystone emblem rendered in cool blue-gray tones, with "MODERN LOCOMOTIVES AND CARS 1939 / PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD" set in bold block lettering along the left margin. Inside, the photography continues in that same crisp black, white, and gray palette — full broadside portraits of locomotives with their spec blocks laid out beside them like trading cards for grown men who loved machinery. This copy is new old stock: genuine unused inventory from that original print run that has simply never circulated.
🚂 The Duplex That Never Was Ordinary
The cover star is Pennsylvania Railroad Class S-1, road number 6100 — a locomotive so unusual it was built as a single, one-of-a-kind experiment, and the booklet's own spec block spells out exactly why railroad men found it fascinating. Instead of the conventional two-cylinder arrangement, the S-1 carried four cylinders, working in two independent pairs, each pair driving its own set of coupled wheels — a wheel arrangement classified as 6-4-4-6, a configuration no other Pennsylvania locomotive ever repeated. At 300 pounds of boiler pressure, 84-inch drivers, and a working weight over a million pounds with tender, the brochure doesn't hedge its bets: it flatly states the engine was capable of sustained speeds over 100 miles an hour. Lore among steam enthusiasts holds that #6100 was built partly to prove a point — that America's railroads could still out-glamour the diesel salesmen nipping at their heels — and that its debut at the 1939 New York World's Fair, posed beside the promise of "The World of Tomorrow," was as much theater as engineering. Old-timers and collectors alike still trade the same bittersweet footnote: for all its size and speed on paper, the S-1 proved too long and too rigid for most of PRR's curving eastern main lines, so it spent much of its working life out on the flatter stretches west of Crestline, Ohio, before it was retired far sooner than its ambition deserved.
🏛️ "The Standard Railroad of the World"
The Pennsylvania Railroad didn't award itself that nickname lightly. Chartered by the Pennsylvania legislature in 1846 to link Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, the company grew, in the span of a single lifetime, into the largest railroad by traffic and revenue anywhere on earth — not merely the biggest railroad, but for a stretch the largest corporation of any kind. By the early 20th century it operated thousands of route-miles across more than a dozen states, rostered hundreds of thousands of freight and passenger cars, and employed a workforce that rivaled small cities. Along the way it absorbed, merged with, or held a piece of hundreds of smaller lines, and it wore the keystone — the same keystone stamped proudly on the nose of #6100 — as a badge that told travelers they were riding the standard against which every other railroad measured itself. A brochure like this one wasn't idle advertising; it was the Standard Railroad of the World reminding the public, in the middle of the Depression's long shadow, that it was still setting the pace.
🔨 The Workhorses Behind the Glamour
Streamlined duplex engines made headlines, but the booklet is honest enough to also show the machines that actually kept the freight and the mail moving — the Class M-1a "Mountain" type (4-8-2), built for heavy through passenger runs or fast freight alike, and the Class I-1s "Decapod" (2-10-0), Pennsylvania's brute-force answer to the heaviest freight service on the system, its ten coupled drivers built for pulling tonnage rather than chasing speed records. Collectors of railroadiana often note that these two classes, unglamorous as they look next to the S-1's chrome-nosed swagger, were the ones logging the real mileage — the Decapods in particular earning a reputation among PRR crews as engines that simply refused to quit. Much of the Pennsylvania's steam fleet, these included, traced its lineage back to the railroad's own Altoona Shops in central Pennsylvania, long regarded by railroad men as one of the most capable locomotive works in the country — a company town in the truest sense, where generations of families built and rebuilt the engines that carried the Standard Railroad's name across the map.
🏙️ Flushing Meadows and the World of Tomorrow
It's worth sitting with the moment this little booklet was printed. The 1939 World's Fair was selling Americans a future of streamlining, speed, and gleaming machinery just as headlines out of Europe were turning darker by the week. Detroit was still years from putting a tailfin on a car, but the same design impulse — smoothing every hard edge into a single confident sweep — was already showing up on locomotive noses like #6100's. Pennsylvania Railroad literature from this era leaned hard into that same optimism, and the pages inside this booklet reportedly walked the reader through more of that fleet, from the already-famous streamlined K4 Pacific to the art-deco GG1 electric, before landing on the brand-new experimental duplex as the railroad's boldest bet yet on what came next. It's a small piece of paper, but it was printed at the exact hinge point between the streamlined dreams of the 1930s and the very different decade that followed.
🎗️ Why It Still Matters
Original PRR equipment literature from this period doesn't turn up often in unused condition — most copies that survive were mailed, read, folded, and eventually tossed. A piece like this stands in for an entire vanished promotional apparatus: the company publicity departments, the shop photographers, the specification writers who once explained a 76,400-pound tractive effort to the traveling public as casually as a modern brochure might describe legroom. For railfans, it's primary-source documentation of a locomotive that only ever existed as one engine. For collectors of Americana and industrial design, it's a snapshot of streamlining as a national mood, not just a styling trend.
🖼️ Display Ideas
- 🚂 Open flat in a shadow box beside a model of the S-1 or another PRR duplex for a paired display
- 🖋️ Stand upright on a library shelf among other transportation and industrial-design ephemera
- 🏛️ Frame the cover photograph facing out for an office or den with a railroad or Pennsylvania theme
- 🎨 Pair with other 1930s streamline-era graphic design pieces to build an Art Deco / Machine Age vignette
- 🎁 Give to a railroad history buff, model railroader, or Pennsylvania native as a genuinely original conversation piece
🎁 Who Collects These
This piece speaks to railroadiana collectors and PRR specialists building out a paper-history archive alongside their models and photographs; to Art Deco and streamline-era design enthusiasts drawn to the cover photography and lettering; to Pennsylvania and Philadelphia-area history buffs tracing the story of the state's signature industrial giant; and to anyone chasing the particular optimism of 1939 — the last full year before the world changed course.
❓ FAQIs this an original 1939 piece or a modern reprint?
This is genuine new old stock — an original Pennsylvania Railroad promotional booklet from its 1939 print run, not a reproduction.
What size is the booklet?
It measures approximately 7½ x 5 inches (about 19 x 12.7 cm), a small oblong format meant to be handled and paged through easily.
What locomotives are covered inside?
The featured locomotive is Class S-1 #6100, the Pennsylvania's unique 6-4-4-6 duplex-drive experimental passenger engine, alongside the Class M-1a Mountain type and the Class I-1s Decapod freight locomotive, each shown with full period specifications.
Was #6100 a one-of-a-kind locomotive?
Yes — the S-1 duplex was built as a single experimental engine and was never duplicated on the Pennsylvania roster, making period documentation like this booklet especially significant.
Does the booklet include photographs or just text?
Both — it's illustrated throughout with black-and-white halftone photography of the locomotives paired with letterpress specification blocks detailing cylinders, driving wheel diameter, weight, and tractive effort.
Is this a good gift for a railroad enthusiast?
It's an excellent piece for anyone into railroadiana, steam locomotive history, or 1930s industrial design — a genuinely original company document rather than a modern collectible made to look old.
