Conway, PA

Why this stop matters

Along the Ohio River northwest of Pittsburgh, Conway Yard was built in 1884 by a Pennsylvania Railroad subsidiary and rebuilt in the 1950s into a pair of automated hump yards that the PRR billed as the world's largest push-button yard. From 1956 to 1980 it was the largest freight yard in the world, sorting the tonnage that fed Pittsburgh's steel mills and moved east and west across the Alleghenies.

Still a major classification yard under Norfolk Southern, Conway is a reminder that this corner of Pennsylvania handled freight at a scale matched by few places on earth — the heavy main-line world the Big Boys were built to work.