“Rocket”

The locomotive called “Rocket” is small enough that it might be easy to pass on the way to a larger engine. Its four green driving wheels, tall smokestack, and exposed machinery invite a closer look. Built in England in 1838, it crossed the Atlantic to help launch passenger service on a new stretch of Pennsylvania railroad. Nearly two centuries later, it stands at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg.

The Philadelphia and Reading Railway ordered Rocket from Braithwaite, Milner & Company of London. After arriving by ship in Philadelphia, it traveled by canal boat to Reading. Horses hauled it the final distance to the railroad terminus, where it entered passenger service on the line between Reading and Pottstown by July 1838. Before it could pull a train, other forms of transportation had to bring the locomotive to its tracks.

Rocket’s work changed as the railway grew. By the mid-1840s it was helping maintain the line and move cars around Reading. The railroad later adapted it to burn anthracite coal and added an enclosed cab. Its final assignment was at the Port Richmond wharves in Philadelphia. When it retired in 1879, the engine had traveled more than 310,000 miles in over forty years of service.

It might then have been scrapped. Instead, Rocket was saved and displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, and a railroad exhibition in 1927. In 1933 it went to Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, where generations of visitors encountered it for nearly ninety years. It arrived at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in 2023 and became the oldest steam locomotive on exhibit there.