My dad worked just before it closed and then worked at Atlantic refinery. good jobs and dangerous. he lost many friends in fires. office building is still there in eddystone. There is also a statue of baldwin at city hall. I’m sure no one either in the building or passersby know who the bloke is.
The Baldwin Locomotive Works was an American builder of railroad locomotives. It was originally located in Philadelphia, and later moved to nearby Eddystone, Pennsylvania. Although the company was very successful as the largest producer of steam locomotives, its transition to the production of diesels was far less so. Later, when the early demand for diesel locomotives to replace steam tapered off, Baldwin could not compete in the marketplace. It stopped producing locomotives in 1956 and went out of business in 1972, having produced over 70,000 locomotives, the vast majority powered by steam.
Initially, Baldwin built many more steam locomotives at its cramped 196 acres (0.79 km2) Broad Street Philadelphia shop[13] but would begin an incremental shift in production to a 616 acres (2.49 km2) site located at Spring Street in nearby Eddystone, Pennsylvania, in 1906. Broad Street was constricted, but even so, it was a huge complex, occupying the better part of 8 square city blocks from Broad to 18th Streets and Spring Garden Street to the Reading tracks just past Noble Street. Eddystone on the other hand was spread out over 600 acres. Its capacity was well over 3000 locomotives per year. The move from Broad Street was completed in the late 1920s.
I worked high - VERY HIGH! - pressure steam turbine repairs at the Eddystone power plant just a few yards away from that old complex a few years ago over Christmas and New Years.
Sobering work: A 12 inch diameter pipe for steam pressures over 4500 psig - needed walls over 4 inches thick.