Baldwin No. 60000 sits at the center of the Franklin Institute’s Hamilton Collections Gallery. The locomotive came from the Baldwin Locomotive Works at Eddystone in 1926, carrying a builder’s number that marked the company’s sixty-thousandth engine. Baldwin used the occasion to demonstrate technical ideas to potential customers. The result was a large 4-10-2 freight locomotive built for trials across several American railroads. It found no buyer and entered the Franklin Institute in 1933.
The ten driving wheels help show the demands a heavy freight engine faced. Its manufacturer had to provide enough power and grip to move a long train while distributing the engine’s weight across the track. Baldwin also explored new ways to produce and use steam. As a demonstration machine, No. 60000 reflects an era when builders were still trying to improve steam locomotive performance. Its career also illustrates how an engineering experiment can survive in a museum even when its design does not become a commercial standard.
The gallery renovation gives visitors a view of another engineering problem. The floor near the locomotive has been cut away to reveal some of the steel and concrete support installed beneath it. The engine stayed in its original location through the renovation. Its altered surroundings let visitors consider the load that a science museum must carry as well as the loads the locomotive was designed to pull. The display invites visitors aboard, with details of current access available from the institute.
The surrounding collection puts the locomotive in the company of inventions and artifacts from other fields. That setting encourages attention to how objects were designed, tried, supported and eventually preserved. Start with the large driving wheels, then look down at the building structure below the rails. Both views show how the material demands of a single locomotive affected the work of people who designed, operated and later exhibited it.
Visitor information
Researched November 2026.
Sources
More railroad museums in Pennsylvania
- Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site — Gallitzin: Railroad engineering and transport historic site
- Horseshoe Curve National Historic Landmark — Altoona: Railroad engineering landmark and visitor site
- Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania — Strasburg: Major railroad museum
- Steamtown National Historic Site — Scranton: Major railroad museum and national historic site
- Colebrookdale Railroad — Preservation Collection — Boyertown: Operating railroad preservation collection
- East Broad Top Railroad & Friends’ Robertsdale Museum — Rockhill Furnace / Robertsdale: Narrow-gauge railroad museum and preservation collection
- Gallitzin Tunnels Park & Museum — Gallitzin: Railroad engineering site, caboose and community museum
- Harris Tower Railroad Museum — Harrisburg: Railroad signal-tower museum
- All 12 railroad museums and sites in Pennsylvania
Keep exploring
- All heritage sites — museums, stations and landmarks
- Northeast — the trains you can ride in the region