Exhibition Review

The new Altoona Railroaders Memorial Museum bills itself as America's Most Interactive Railroad Museum. A better slogan might have been: This Is Not Your Father's Railroad Museum. As visitors enter the lobby, an exacting replica of a K4s, the first American steam locomotive designed according to scientific principles, idles in the foreground. But the emphasis in this introductory exhibit, much like that of the rest of the museum, is on people. A life cast of an African American porter stands next to the engine. To the left, and below plane, a pair of riveters work on a locomotive boiler in one of Altoona's shops. In the right-hand corner, a female signal operator leans out from a railroad tower. Behind visitors, lights glow from a second-floor window of a railroader's house. Ambient sounds of whistles, rivets, steam engines, even the shouts of newspaper boys, pervade the scene.	1
Emphasizing people over wheels and gears is no small feat in any transportation museum, but it is especially challenging within this genre. Rail buffs make for loyal but finicky constituents: most expect museums to dwell on the technical and stylistic distinctions of engines and rolling stock and have been known to hold curators to fastidious levels of historical fidelity. But trains also have a way of seducing the general public. Telling visitors to look past the locomotives in a railroad museum is like asking tourists in the Sistine Chapel not to stare at the ceiling.	2
If there is any place where the story of the people behind the machines could be told, it is in Altoona. From this "base camp" at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) manufactured and maintained nearly everything it needed to run and maintain a railroad. By the early twentieth century, the Altoona works—the prr's original shop complex—had become the national standard for railroad shops and a model of corporate integration and efficiency. (Always in search of better and more efficient methods for delivering its product, the PRR created one of the most extensive industrial testing labs, where items from light bulbs to oranges were tweaked for maximum efficiency.) At their peak in the 1920s, the Altoona shops spread out over seven miles of valley floor and employed 16,500 workers, from foundry laborers to highly skilled mechanical engineers and scientists. A large banner that hangs in the lobby underscores the point and the museum's mission: "Here in Altoona, an army of railroaders designed, built, maintained and moved the Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest railroad in the world. In so doing they changed the face of America."	3
The Altoona Railroaders Memorial Museum tells the story with some of the liveliest and technically most dazzling exhibits of any American history museum. Visitors who loiter near the lobby exhibit, for instance, witness a sound-and-light show of Disneyesque proportions. As the lights dim, voices begin drifting out of the second-floor window and we hear a young boy ask his grandparents what it was like to live and work in Altoona. This triggers a series of recollections that are cued to the adjacent scene; as grandfather talks about the sounds of the rivets, the laborers on the shop floor are illuminated, and we hear the sounds and see the smoke. While the narrative borders on celebration—the gist of the story is that the Altoona was a great place to live and work—the program creates a stunning opening curtain and, more important, an effective visual and psychological segue to 1920s Altoona.	. . .