Altoona museum saves 1939 World’s Fair yard floodlights

ALTOONA, Pa. — A trio of aging 100-foot-tall yard floodlights that once illuminated the railroad exhibit at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair is finding a new home here at the Railroaders Memorial Museum.

Fabricated with a three-legged cross-section, the towers were among at least four built for the 17-acre railroad grounds, which, in addition to displays of stationary locomotives and cars, featured a 3,000-seat grandstand. It faced a multi-track stage on which a cast of hundreds of singers, dancers, and actors carried out daily performances of a “Railroads on Parade” pageant, with modern and vintage trains.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was a key player at the exhibit, sponsored by 27 Eastern railroads. PRR’s Long Island Rail Road subsidiary built a station on the fairgrounds, and some PRR trains from the Midwest ran straight through Manhattan’s Penn Station, carrying passengers — as promised in PRR advertising — “straight to the gate.”

Even more extravagant, PRR’s board ordered its Altoona Shops to build an outsized, one-of-a-kind streamlined steam passenger locomotive for the fair. Designated Class S1 with an unconventional 6-4-4-6 wheel arrangement, it measured 140 feet long and rode on seven-foot-diameter drivers. As fairgoers watched, No. 6100 chugged away at high speed on rollers mounted in a stationary treadmill.

Posted throughout the railroad grounds were several light towers, each crowned with a decorative three-ring finial of unmistakably Art Deco design. After the fair closed, workers dismantled the towers and PRR shipped them to Altoona, simplifying their design and re-erecting four of them around its freight yards.

They stood for another 80 years through mergers and ownership changes from PRR to Penn Central, to Conrail, and finally, to Norfolk Southern. Nobody gave them much thought until a few years ago when a windstorm blew down one, which had been weakened by its rusted mounting fixtures.

“Do you want them?”

At some point after that, NS inspected the remaining three towers, deemed them to be safety hazards, and planned to remove them. Local NS employees who were aware of their heritage called museum Executive Director Joe DeFrancesco.

What he heard next, he said, was: “These are coming down, do you want them?”

DeFrancesco seized on the connection between the Pennsy — which employed 16,000 workers in its 218-acre shops here about 1916 — and the World’s Fair. In fact, one of the museum’s own permanent exhibits highlights that connection. He recognized at once that the towers “are a tremendous asset.”

NS hired contractor Chris Dell to remove them, a task complicated by their size and placement. “They’re not in ideal locations, [with] close clearances, power lines, and tracks,” DeFrancesco said. “We’re fortunate that the contractor understood what they are, and is taking a lot of care in the disassembly of them and bringing them over piece by piece to the museum.”

The superstructures are “not in terrible shape, and repairs need to be done,” he said. “Welding will restore their integrity, and they should go back together pretty easily.”

Even so, he said, “the anchor bolts were shot — severely corroded. We got these in the nick of time.”

Relocation to the museum began earlier this week with the first tower being taken down at Rose Yard in Altoona’s Juniata neighborhood. The others will follow within two weeks.

One is standing in East Altoona, near the site of what was once the world’s largest roundhouse, at 52 stalls. The other is at a yard at Fourth Street, just a few blocks from the museum’s headquarters in the former PRR Master Mechanics Building at 1200 Ninth Ave.

Of local NS employees, DeFrancesco said, “we really appreciate them looking out for something like this, having a chance to be saved before it was salvaged or scrapped.”

Evaluating and fund-raising

After storing them, assessing their condition, and mounting a fund-raising campaign, he said, the museum plans to re-erect at least one and possibly all three.

“We have drone footage, but that only shows so much,” he said, noting that if the upper structure of any of them is too far gone, a finial — about 10 feet tall — would make a fine display at ground level. “While we’re raising funds, volunteers will primer the sections and get them ready to be welded back together.”

One tower would be placed near the east side of the museum’s quarter-roundhouse, and a second one, if feasible, would be placed west of there, near the turntable. “If we [restore] more than one, we’ll do one with the Altoona [simplified yard] configuration, and the second one we’d like to do in the World’s Fair configuration,” with multiple rings of lights fastened at intervals below the finials.

A few mysteries surround the structures, DeFrancesco said, including who built them and how many were built. “We assume that they were made here [in the PRR shops], but we don’t know,” he said. “We can make educated assumptions, to be proven by evidence and facts as they surface.”

Historic significance

“From a preservation standpoint it’s a big deal,” said DeFrancesco. The project has other benefits, too, including that it’s a case of adaptive re-use, it’s a “very achievable goal,” and it fills a need to provide exterior lighting that would otherwise be costly to purchase new. “And there’s the added benefit of the lightning rod,” he said.

“It’s the largest [extant railroad exhibit] artifact from the World’s Fair,” he said. “I’m not sure what else is out there that survives from the railroad exhibit that would be that large.”

The only other large remaining piece known to have been displayed there, he surmised, is H3-class 2-8-0 steam locomotive No. 1187 (PRR Altoona Works, 1888), now in the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania collection at Strasburg.

The World’s Fair connection, DeFrancesco said, ties the museum to the excitement and pageantry of those days: “The big streamliners of the time, the modern passenger equipment, all the famous people that would have walked through there, [and] the apex of steam technology with the S1 [locomotive].”

The floodlights at least went on to a useful purpose, outlasting the Pennsy itself. The celebrated No. 6100 didn’t fare so well. It entered regular service, running at well over 100 mph on PRR’s level, straight route between Chicago and Crestline, Ohio. But it was too large and ungainly, and PRR scrapped it about 1949.

Of the tower project, DeFrancesco said, “It’s unique. It adds another architectural element to our outdoor displays. It’s our goal to have it restored to the skyline of Altoona [in a] relatively trackside [location]. We’re excited to light up the sky.”

— Updated at 9:15 a.m. to correct photo credit to L.R. Myers