East Broad Top Railroad Machine Shop, Rockhill Furnace

The machine shop at Rockhill Furnace is the building the East Broad Top Railroad used to repair its own locomotives. The Historic American Engineering Record filed its photographs and drawings of the shop as HAER PA-127-A; the written history is in the parent report on the shop complex, PA-127, by historian Matthew Kierstead, from documentation begun in 1989 and continued in 1994.

That report says the railroad bought the T. E. Orbison farm in 1872 as the site for its shops, and that the shops grew around an 1867 stone farmhouse that served as the first office. On April 15, 1878, the board of directors recorded that sending locomotives to Baldwin's for repairs had proved expensive and unsatisfactory, and that the Pennsylvania Railroad had agreed to do the work at Altoona. By the summer of 1881 the East Broad Top was buying tools for a new machine shop. The T-shaped core of the wood frame, board-and-batten building, powered by a single boiler, was apparently finished in November or December of 1881 with an engine repair area inside it. In 1882 the board noted that engines could now be repaired in two or three days instead of a month to six weeks.

In what the survey calls the Seibert era the main shop floor was roughly doubled in length, and the survey reads the patent dates on the machines as suggesting a major purchase of new machinery just after the turn of the century. Two 100 horsepower Babcock and Wilcox boilers were installed in that period, feeding a steam engine said to have come from the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company plant, which turns a belt-driven lineshaft system of nearly three dozen separate shafts running machinery in the machine shop, blacksmith shop and foundry. The 1991 county inventory lists the machine shop with a foundry, blacksmith shop, boiler shop, car shop, electrician's shop and supply shed.

The entire holdings of the Rockhill Coal Company, the railroad among them, were sold to the Kovalchick company of Indiana, Pennsylvania, on May 1, 1956. When the survey team looked at the buildings in 1994, the machine shop roof had been elaborately shored up.

Checked 2026-09-05 · Library of Congress survey record, read in full

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