Pennsylvania Railroad

The Pennsylvania Railroad, nicknamed the Pennsy, was an American rail network established in 1846 and headquartered in Philadelphia that grew into the largest railroad in the world by traffic and revenue by 1882. At its peak the network controlled at least 800 other rail lines and companies and, by the end of 1926, operated roughly 11,640 miles of track stretching across the northeastern and midwestern United States, connecting major cities including New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago and St. Louis with the New York Central Railroad as its principal rival network. The Pennsylvania Railroad pioneered major engineering works to keep its network competitive, including electrifying its Northeast Corridor and New York-Washington main lines in the 1930s, work whose infrastructure Amtrak's Northeast Corridor still uses today. Financial difficulties in the 1960s led the network to merge with the New York Central in 1968 to form Penn Central, which collapsed into bankruptcy within two years, a failure significant enough that it helped prompt the federal government to create Conrail and Amtrak to keep the routes the Pennsylvania Railroad had built running.