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Images of Rail Baltimore And Ohio Railroad In West Virginia, The by Bob Withers
Images of Rail The Baltimore And Ohio Railroad In West Virginia by Bob Withers
127 pages
Softcover
Copyright 2007
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction6
I.Passengers9
2.Freight27
3.Locals39
4.Locomotives53
5.Special Movements67
6.Wrecks81
7.Structures91
8.Trackwork109
9.People113
INTRODUCTION
West Virginia's history and growth always has been associated with that of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), which predated the state's formation by 36 years.
The B&O was chartered in 1827 to operate between Baltimore and the Ohio River by Maryland capitalists who feared their city would be left out of the lucrative East Coast-to-Midwest trade that other eastern cities were developing. With the early 19th-century turnpikes and the National Road, Baltimore was well positioned for that traffic, until the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 gave New York a tremendous advantage with its level and inexpensive access to the very territory Baltimore was targeting.
Railroads in England were in their infancy, but Baltimore's desperate bankers and merchants were convinced they had to gamble on the new technology. Construction began on July 4, 1828, following a parade and the ceremonial laying of a cornerstone in which Charles Carroll of Carrollton, last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, participated. The B&O thus became the United States' first common-carrier railroad.
The company started the country's first regular passenger service over its first 13 miles of trackage from Baltimore to Ellicott's Mills on May 24, 1830. Horses provided the earliest motive power until suitable steam locomotives-with tiny vertical boilers-could be developed.
Among the earliest riders were former president John Quincy Adams, en route from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., on December 17, 1830, to begin serving in the House of Representatives, and Pres. Andrew Jackson-the first sitting president to try out "the carrs [sic]"-on June 6, 1833, as part of a tour to combat the northeastern states' divisive "nullification" doctrine.
The railroad entered what is now West Virginia at Harpers Ferry in December 1834 and crossed back into Maryland at Cumberland in November 1842. Political pressure kept the B&O out of Pennsylvania at first, and so track crews headed westward, back into West Virginia and across the Allegheny Mountains-and their formidable grades of up to 2.2 percent-to the Ohio River town of Wheeling.
The torturous mountain route plagued construction, and crews took until May 1852 to reach Grafton. From there, work proceeded apace. Crews arrived in Fairmont in June, and on Christmas Eve, gangs working from both directions completed the 379-mile line at Roseby's Rock, a remote spot 18 miles southeast of Wheeling. The first train from Baltimore to the Ohio arrived in Wheeling on New Year's Day, 1853.
Even before the line was completed, B&O realized it had made a mistake by heading for a town so far north on the river. It backed construction of the North Western Virginia Railroad, which struck out from Grafton in 1852 and reached the river town of Parkersburg, 93 miles south of Wheeling, in 1857. Through affiliations and mergers in subsequent years, this route became B&O's main line between Baltimore and St. Louis.
In 1861, the railroad found itself in the crosshairs of the Civil War because it virtually straddled the boundary between North and South and served as Washington's only rail outlet to the North. It quickly became a pawn for both sides, even though President Lincoln pressured B&O president John W. Garrett to keep it on the Union side.
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