Baltimore and Ohio Railroad

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) is one of the oldest railroads in the United States, with an original line from the port of Baltimore, Maryland west to the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia and Parkersburg, West Virginia. It is now part of the CSX network, and includes the oldest operational railroad bridge in the world. The B&O also coincidentally included the Leiper Railroad, the first permanent railroad in the U.S.

The railroad's former shops in Baltimore, including the Mt. Clare roundhouse, now house the B&O Railroad Museum.

History

Two men — Philip E. Thomas and George Brown — were the pioneers of the railroad. They spent the year 1826 investigating railway enterprises in England, which were at that time being tested in a comprehensive fashion as commercial ventures. Their investigation completed, they held an organizational meeting on February 12, 1827, including about twenty-five citizens, most of whom were Baltimore merchants or bankers. Maryland state laws relating to the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road#1826 Chapter 123, passed February 28, 1827, and the state of Virginia on March 8, 1827, chartered the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road Company, with the task of building a railroad from the port of Baltimore, Maryland west to a suitable point on the Ohio River. The railroad, formally incorporated April 24, was intended to provide an alternative, faster, route for Midwestern goods to reach the East Coast than the seven-year-old, hugely successful, but slow Erie Canal across upstate New York. Thomas was elected as the first president and Brown the treasurer. The capital of the proposed company was fixed at five million dollars.

Construction began on July 4, 1828, and the first section, from Baltimore west to Ellicott's Mills (now known as Ellicott City), opened on May 24, 1830. Further extensions opened to Frederick (including the short Frederick Branch) December 1, 1831, Point of Rocks April 2, 1832, Sandy Hook December 1, 1834 (the connection to the Winchester and Potomac Railroad at Harpers Ferry opening in 1837), Martinsburg May 1842, Hancock June 1842, Cumberland November 5, 1842, Piedmont July 21, 1851, Fairmont June 22, 1852 and its terminus at Wheeling, West Virginia (then part of Virginia) on January 1, 1853. A steel and stone bridge was built across the Ohio River between Bellaire and Wheeling in 1871, connecting the B&O to its leased property the Central Ohio Railroad. This provided a direct rail connection to Columbus, Ohio.

On July 20, 1877 there were bloody riots in Baltimore, Maryland from Baltimore and Ohio Railroad workers. Nine rail workers were killed at the hands of the Maryland militia. The next day workers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania staged a sympathy strike that was also met with an assault by the state militia; Pittsburgh then erupted into widespread rioting.

The Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad in the early 1880s, cutting off the B&O's access to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The B&O chartered the Philadelphia Branch in Maryland and the Baltimore and Philadelphia Railroad in Delaware and Pennsylvania and built a parallel route, finished in 1886. It purchased the Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad and the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad in 1893. The Baltimore Belt Line, opened in 1895, connected the main line to the Philadelphia Branch without the need for a car ferry across the Patapsco River, but the cost of constructing the Howard Street Tunnel drove the B&O to bankruptcy in 1896.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad took control of the B&O in 1963, and incorporated it, along with the Western Maryland Railway, into the Chessie System in 1973. In 1980, the Chessie System merged with the Seaboard System Railroad to create CSX. In 1986, the B&O finally went out of existence as a formal corporate existence when it formally merged with the C&O (which itself formally merged with CSX later that same year). At the height of railroading's golden age, the B&O was one of several trunk lines uniting the northeast quadrant of the United States into an industrial zone. It marked the southern border and corresponded to the New York Central's marking of the northern border. The Pennsy and the Erie railroads worked the center. The corners of this map are Baltimore in the southeast, Albany in the northeast, Chicago in the northwest, and St. Louis in the southwest.

Early engineering

When construction began on the B&O in the 1820s, railroad engineering was in its infancy. Unsure exactly which materials would suffice, the B&O erred on the side of sturdiness and built many of its early structures of granite. Even the track bed to which iron strap rail was affixed consisted of the stone.

Though the granite soon proved too unforgiving and expensive for track, most of the B&O's bridges have survived until the present, and many are still in active railroad use by CSX. Baltimore's Carrollton Viaduct, named in honor of Charles Carroll of Carrollton (who laid the cornerstone), was the B&O's first bridge, and is the world's oldest railroad bridge still in use. The Thomas Viaduct in Relay, Maryland was the longest bridge in the United States upon its completion in 1835, and remains in use as well. The B&O made extensive use of the Bollman iron truss bridge in the mid-1800s; its durability and ease of assembly aided faster railroad construction.

As the B&O built west from Baltimore in 1830, it followed the banks of the Patapsco River upstream to the water's source at Parrs Spring near present-day Mount Airy, Maryland. At the time little data about the operation of steam locomotives was available, and consequently the B&O was uncertain if metal wheels would grip the metal rails sufficiently to pull a train up to the top of Parrs Ridge. The railroad decided to construct two inclined planes on each side of the ridge along which teams of horses, and perhaps steam-powered winches, would assist pulling the trains uphill. The planes, about a mile long on each side of the ridge, quickly proved an operational bottleneck, and before the decade of the 1830s ended the B&O built a 5.5 mile long alternate route that became known as the Mount Airy Loop. The planes were quickly abandoned and forgotten, though some artifacts survive to the present

Branches

Washington

In 1831 a law was passed in Maryland, enabling the B&O to build its Washington Branch, connecting Baltimore to the national capital of Washington, D.C. This opened in 1835, and later served as a terminus for the Annapolis and Elk Ridge Railroad to Annapolis.

Mount Airy

The Mount Airy Branch is the surviving, in-use portion of the 1839-opened Mount Airy Loop. The Loop had been mainline track until superseded by the Mount Airy Cutoff and Tunnel in 1902.

Frederick

The Frederick Branch was built as part of the original line, opening on December 1, 1831. The continuation of the main line from Frederick Junction opened April 2, 1832.

Metropolitan

The Metropolitan Branch was opened in the early 1870s. It leaves the District of Columbia and proceeds northwest through Montgomery County, joining the B&O main line at Point of Rocks. It serves as a bypass around Baltimore and is still in active use.

Georgetown

The line was operated in some manner from 1889 until 1985 when it was proposed for abandonment; it served basically as a minor freight spur carrying coal and building materials to local outlets in Chevy Chase, Bethesda and Georgetown. It was originally built with the intention of connecting to southern railroads to compete with the Pennsylvania Railroad's Long Bridge, but no bridge across the Potomac River was ever built. The abandoned right-of-way is now used as the Capital Crescent Trail.

Patuxent Branch

The Patuxent Branch was constructed in the 1880s and split off from the Washington Branch at Savage, Maryland to serve a mill, a quarry, and other small industry. After 1925, the line was gradually cut back, and disconnected completely in 2005.

Trivia

In the U.S. version of the board game Monopoly, the B&O is one of the four railroad properties on the board, though it did not serve Atlantic City, New Jersey, from which many of the US edition's properties are named.
A one-time B&O warehouse at the Camden Yards rail junction in Baltimore now dominates the view over the right-field wall at the Baltimore Orioles' current home, Oriole Park at Camden Yards.