This particular shot would be appropriate next month for Memorial Day, if I thought such things should be saved for specific times. I try to remember veterans every day. This is a fairly good sized list of Pittsburgh and West Virginia Railroad employees who served in World War II. I found it remarkable in a couple of ways. This railroad in particular must have been stretched to the limit during the war with all the region's industrial might focused on all-out war production at that time. Missing all of those employees while this was going on had to compound the challenge. You won't see it well in this thinned out copy of the photo but there are a lot of unusual last names that are listed multiple times with different first names. Must have been families, brothers, or fathers and sons in some cases. Railroads did employ a lot of people from the same families. And, skilled rail workers would have been useful to the military regardless of age. Unfortunately I counted 11 stars next to some of those names.
This monument can be found next to Rook Yard west of Pittsburgh. It is next to a residential street by the engine house. It made me wonder; Could a railroad the same size as the P&WV (a small part of the "Alphabet Route" and absorbed by N&W in the 1960's) withstand the loss of this many employees today and keep functioning? I doubt a railroad this size would be classified as much more than a shortline today, certainly functioning with a tiny fraction of the people and a fraction of the traffic. Today, the P&WV is run by the Wheeling and Lake Erie, a classy shortline that also once "assimilated" with the N&W, now NS empire. I'd give anything to see one of those Alphabet Route "Alpha Jets" blasting by Rook Yard enroute to the next link in the chain. Some of those guys on the list probably made that happen back in the day.
BC
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