The Altoona shops are unusual in the fact that both locomotives and cars of the highest capacity and finest type are built within them, in addition to a great repair and refurnishing work being carried forward there at all times. To do this work, the plant, employing during the seasons of heaviest traffic something like 15,000 men--is divided into several divisions that stretch themselves along the railroad tracks for about six miles. The first of these divisions consists of the foundries, devoted largely to the manufacture of cast-iron car-wheels of every size and grade. Extensive cupolas, core-rooms and moulding-floors are provided for making 1,000 car-wheels every 24 hours. There is the blacksmith shop as part of this particular plant. The blacksmith is one of the handiest of men about a railroad shop and one of the few to survive the almost universal introduction of machine processes. There are also the machine and pattern shops, together with a large foundry for the manufacture of castings for cars and locomotives, having a capacity of 200 tons a day. The second division of industrial activity at Altoona is the locomotive repair shop. This is the largest of all the individual plants at that point, employing about 5,000 men, and with its three- and four-story structures built closely within a busy yard it is a veritable city within a city. It has a capacity of about 1,800 reconstructed and repaired locomotives a year and is a shop well calculated to fill any one with respect. The third division is the Junction shops, where the new locomotives are built; 1,800 men are employed within it, and there men take the new castings and forgings (most of the castings coming up from the giant foundries that we have just noticed), and from them they create that almost human thing, the railroad locomotive. When the locomotive emerges from that shop it takes its turn upon the testing-table, the mechanical experts place their final stamp of approval upon it, and at last it goes out from the shop, under its own steam, to perform the great work for which it was created.