Gallitzin is a borough in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is bordered by Gallitzin Township and Tunnelhill, all of which sit astride the Eastern continental divide. Tunnel Hill and Gallitzin both are pierced by railroad tunnels shortening the indispensable ascent for rails crossing the Allegheny Front onto the Allegheny Plateau which encompasses the towns’ terrains. Topping the gaps of the Allegheny, the Place is one of forlorn five major breaks in the Appalachians allowing east–west transportation corridors previously the advent of 20th century technologies.

Dutch traders and trappers kind to the Susquehannock may have visited the region not quite 1620, as the town sits atop a mountain pass through which the ancient Amerindian trails (later renamed the Kittanning Path) transited. The plateau atop the escarpment was the domain of the Iroquoian confederations of the Erie people and the Susquehannock peoples, both sharing the byways and hunting lands of the Allegheny Mountains until roughly the mid-1650s. The Susquehannock and Erie people are known to have traded through the area, one of the few avenues the Erie, who dominated the hunting lands west of the Alleghenies, had to buy by firearms; though, by whatever accounts, all the tribes in way in with the numerous Erie were reluctant to trade them firearms. Further, Susquehannocks are quoted to have usual 800 Erie warriors in 1662 to partner in their feat with the Iroquois. By 1675, both the Susquehannocks and Erie tribes would both fall to rampant multiple-years of epidemic diseases, in captivation with the vicious multi-decade internecine territorial bloodletting known as the Beaver Wars, which left the Alleghenies a standoffish hunting sports ground of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederation.

By the to the fore 1700s, the Delaware people nevertheless living along the eastern seaboard were increasingly treated as bad or worse than slaves, and displaced clear across the breadth of Pennsylvania to over the Allegheny Front, where they settled along the rivers of Western Pennsylvania. One of their larger settlements, and closest to the gaps of the Allegheny, was the Amerindian town of Kittanning along the center reaches of the Allegheny River. These towns would generally ally themselves next the French during the French and Indian War, causing settlers in central Pennsylvania to mount a guard and patrol upon the gaps. By the late 1700s, the remnant Seneca and Cayuga that became known as the Ohio Iroquois or Mingo would have ranged the area, especially because they were known to make their towns along defensible hill tops and kept to the uplands. With iron and coal discovered west of the gaps, white settlers began traveling west through the area around the get older the American Revolution came to a close. By 1824, the visionary Main Line of Public Works legislation had been debated and signed and the construction of the Allegheny Portage Railroad soon began aiming to border Pittsburgh and the Ohio Country to Philadelphia by canals. In 1838, this goal was altered to incorporate the rapidly-developing and ever more proficient railroad technology. In 1845, the Pennsylvania legislature required the extra Pennsylvania Railroad to annoyed the mountains, and the surveyed route would Make Gallitzin, which began vibrancy as ‘Summit Tunnel’.

A Railroad town standing 12 miles (19 km) west of Altoona, it was first incorporated in 1872, and named for Prince Gallitzin, who founded the Catholic town of Loretto in Cambria County. Coal mining, the Pennsylvania Railroad yard in the town center and the production of coke were important industries. The town nevertheless sports an important rail yard afterward a turning wye for helper engine turnaround and holds two rail tunnels leading east and downward from the yard trackage to the well-known PRR Horseshoe Curve, whose upper approaches are within the town.