The Pennsy Shops — where Fort Wayne built locomotives

1857–1953 · THE PITTSBURGH, FORT WAYNE & CHICAGO / PENNSYLVANIA SHOPS

The founding: A railroad hub is made of track; a railroad city is made of shops. In 1852 Samuel Hanna donated a parcel east of Clinton Street for the anticipated railroad shops. On the south side of the tracks, blacksmiths John and Charles Cooper set up shop in 1853; the Kentuckian Sion S. Bass bought the operation in 1854 and built it into a foundry and machine shop; and in September 1857 Jones, Bass and Company sold the works to the new Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad, whose directors — encouraged by Hanna — had chosen Fort Wayne as the site of the line's great repair and construction shops. That was the beginning of the Pennsy Shops. Across the street, the Bass Foundry — Sion's brother John H. Bass's works — grew into for a time the world's largest maker of railroad car wheels and a principal supplier to the shops; the two plants together made Fort Wayne a place where the nation's rolling stock was not merely run but made.

The scale: The shops grew with the Civil War, supplying material help to the Union effort, and by the time the Pennsylvania took over the line in 1869 they were a major enterprise. The 1880 county history counts the workforce department by department — car shops 250, blacksmith shop 119, roundhouse 75, machine shop 75, boiler and copper shops 45, and the rest — 614 men in all, with an estimated $350,000 to $400,000 a year paid in shop wages alone. By 1889 Brant and Fuller's county history counted over 1,100 names on the labor rolls — the yards included, the train crews and clerks a separate "regiment" besides — and a monthly payroll disbursement in Fort Wayne of over $100,000. Between 1867 and 1869 the shops turned out seven sumptuous "Fort Wayne Silver Palace Cars," refinements of the Pullman design, at the then-staggering cost of $18,000 each. The complex the Pennsylvania expanded in 1882, 1903 and 1918 eventually stretched along the tracks for nearly three miles; the historical marker on the site sums the whole account: three hundred locomotives and twelve thousand cars designed and built here.

The long decline: The bigger, heavier locomotives of the new century outgrew the plant. Fort Wayne ceased to make locomotives after the First World War, and the work narrowed to repair and overhaul; locomotive rebuilding ended in 1933, though the shops continued to build passenger cars. After the Second World War the decline sharpened. In 1953 the last of the railroad operations closed; in the mid-1950s the massive complex between Clinton and Lafayette was sold off piecemeal, its machine and blacksmith shops demolished for parking; by 1966 all the property had been abandoned, and in 1984 the roundhouse — the last vestige of the Pennsy Shops — was razed. A marker, a street name and the Historical Society's photographs are what the site keeps. The shops' century is the single largest reason "railroad city" is not a metaphor in Fort Wayne: for three generations the largest single body of skilled workmen in the city wore the Pennsylvania's name.

Sources: ACGSI, Pennsylvania Railroad history of Fort Wayne (History Center text) — Hanna's 1852 land donation, the Cooper brothers 1853, Bass's purchase 1854 and the 1857 sale, the Silver Palace Cars 1867–69 at $18,000 each, locomotive building to the First World War, rebuilding ended 1933, the 1953 closing, abandonment by 1966 and the roundhouse razed 1984; History of Allen County (1880) — the September 1857 sale by Jones, Bass and Company and the 614-man departmental count; Brant and Fuller, Valley of the Upper Maumee (1889) — over 1,100 on the labor rolls and the monthly payroll over $100,000; NRHP record for the Pennsylvania Station — the expansions of 1882, 1903 and 1918 and the nearly three-mile complex; Kevin Leininger, "The Pennsy Shops," News-Sentinel Cityscapes (1981) — the marker's three hundred locomotives and twelve thousand cars, the Bass Foundry as the world's largest maker of railroad wheels, the piecemeal sale of the mid-1950s.