Check Out this Relic from Beech Grove

This week’s Throwback Thursday is brought to you by our awesome employees at the Amtrak maintenance facility in Beech Grove, Ind. These are a pair of safety glasses that a welder from the 1970s originally used there. Groovy, huh?

Amtrak purchased the Beech Grove shops on April 1, 1975, from the Penn Central Transportation Company, and they became the main maintenance facilities for our railroad system.

“BEE” (as it’s affectionately called) is just outside of Indianapolis and employs more than 500 people, many sons and daughters of original employees. The facility is used to maintain and overhaul some of our coolest equipment like the sleeper cars used for long-distance trips–yep, the single and bi-level ones. Beech Grove is also where locomotives from all over the country are overhauled and rebuilt.

Perhaps one of the coolest things about the maintenance facility is that it’s within its own, independent city, which was originally developed for arriving craftsmen and women coming to the maintenance facility.

If you’re lucky enough to catch our one-of-a-kind Business Car out on the rails, it even gets its name from the facility. That’s right, it’s called the “Beech Grove.”

Want to learn more about the history of Beech Grove? Check out history.amtrak.com.