Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia
    The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia
    The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia
    Ebook183 pages55 minutes

    The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia

    By Bob Withers

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In 1827, a group of Baltimore capitalists feared their city would be left out of the lucrative East Coast-to-Midwest trade that other eastern cities were developing; thus, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was chartered. Political pressure kept the B&O out of Pennsylvania at first, and so track crews
    headed for what is now West Virginia, building mountainous routes with torturous grades to Wheeling and Parkersburg. Eventually the B&O financed and acquired a spiderweb of branch lines that covered much of the northern and central parts of the Mountain State. This book takes a close look at the line's locomotives, passenger and freight trains,
    structures, and, most importantly, its people who endeared their company to generations of travelers, shippers, and small Appalachian communities.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 26, 2007
    ISBN9781439619377
    The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia
    Author

    Bob Withers

    Author Bob Withers is a retired reporter and copy editor for the Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, West Virginia, and a bi-vocational Baptist pastor. He and his wife, Sue Ann, have three daughters and three grandchildren. He is the author of two previous books--The President Travels by Train (TLC Publishing, 1996 and 2004) and Trackside around West Virginia, 1963-1968 (Morning Sun Books, 2006)--and several magazine articles on railroading.

    Related to The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia

    Related ebooks

    Photography For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Jesse James Died Here

      Sep 29, 2020

      Jesse James Died Here
      3 min read

    • Article

      Tracking Progress

      Mar 26, 2019

      Tracking Progress
      2 min read

    • Article

      Highway To The Future

      Nov 27, 2018

      Highway To The Future
      11 min read

    • Article

      Nobles’ Undertaking

      Jul 23, 2019

      Nobles’ Undertaking
      5 min read

    • Article

      All Aboard!

      Apr 30, 2022

      All Aboard!
      5 min read

    • Article

      Off the Rails

      Jul 23, 2019

      Off the Rails
      12 min read

    • Article

      Hill’s country

      Feb 22, 2022

      Hill’s country
      5 min read

    • Article

      City of Unrest

      Jul 27, 2021

      City of Unrest
      4 min read

    • Article

      West Words

      Sep 29, 2020

      ‘The greater portion of the laborers employed by us are Chinese, who constitute a large element in the population of California. Without them it would be impossible to complete the western portion of this great national enterprise within the time req

      3 min read

    • Article

      George Hudson Railway Villain Or Railway Visionary?

      Jun 16, 2022

      In an article published in July 1847, the Pictorial Times wrote of how men such as William Wordsworth, James Watt and George Stephenson had made their mark in life despite their lowly beginnings. However, the paper continued, there was one man who st

      19 min read

    • Article

      The Sumpter Valley Railroad

      Nov 12, 2018

      The Sumpter Valley Railroad
      15 min read

    • Article

      Binding the Republic Together

      Sep 1, 2023

      Binding the Republic Together
      3 min read

    • Article

      Biggest In The World!

      Jun 4, 2019

      The world has waited six decades to see a Union Pacific Railroad (UP) Big Boy 4-8-8-4 back in action – and now No. 4014, one of eight survivors of the behemoth class, has taken over as the biggest operational steam locomotive on the planet. As highli

      9 min read

    • Article

      Fairbank, Arizona

      Mar 1, 2022

      Fairbank, Arizona
      4 min read

    • Article

      Road Work

      May 4, 2021

      Road Work
      14 min read

    • Article

      Stamps Of The USA

      Aug 11, 2023

      Stamps Of The USA
      8 min read

    • Article

      Tunnel Vision

      Apr 14, 2022

      Tunnel Vision
      5 min read

    • Article

      Life On The Colorado

      Aug 24, 2021

      Life On The Colorado
      10 min read

    • Article

      Roads To Nowhere

      Feb 12, 2019

      Roads To Nowhere
      5 min read

    • Article

      Watery Waymaking

      Sep 24, 2019

      Watery Waymaking
      13 min read

    • Article

      Canal Fever

      May 16, 2023

      Canal Fever
      1 min read

    • Article

      Readers’ Platform

      May 30, 2022

      Readers’ Platform
      4 min read

    • Article

      Canal Continuity

      Sep 24, 2019

      Canal Continuity
      1 min read

    • Article

      Mosaic

      Jul 23, 2019

      Mosaic
      6 min read

    • Article

      Fuel For The Fight

      Aug 24, 2021

      Fuel For The Fight
      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia - Bob Withers

      collection.)

      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.

      The company helped keep the nation together during the first major war during which railroads played a pivotal role, but the cost was high. Much of its property was wrecked and rebuilt, in some cases several times. Among the most severe losses were its engine facilities at Martinsburg and the original bridge across the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry.

      Following the conflict, many of B&O’s corporate decisions rendered it an underdog in a northeast market dominated by the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads. As a result, it often grew by taking over smaller roads no one else wanted. But what the company lacked on the bottom line was greatly compensated for by the hospitality and helpfulness of its people. It is said that Pres. Franklin Roosevelt preferred B&O to the Pennsylvania when he went home to Hyde Park, New York, in part because of its down-home attitudes.

      B&O enjoyed one other advantage—vast deposits of West Virginia coal, which began flowing toward the East in the mid-1840s and have not abated to this day. That led the railroad to finance and/or acquire, by 1917, a spiderweb of branch lines that covered much of the northern and central parts of the Mountain State. For 70 years thereafter, B&O operated all those acquisitions as a single carrier, helping to link 13 great states with the nation, as the company’s slogan said.

      The fact that B&O was the only east-west line passing directly through Washington handed it some notable passengers, including most U.S. presidents and occasionally British royalty. Perhaps some of the most unique passengers included a party from the Library of Congress escorting the original U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and other valuable artifacts from the nation’s capital to the gold bullion depository in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in a sleeping car room aboard the National Limited for safekeeping during World War II. The precious cargo passed through West Virginia—unknown to the train’s other passengers—in the wee hours of December 27, 1941.

      The company’s familiar postwar paint scheme of blue and gray with yellow trim bespoke of the company’s Civil War heritage. Its finely tuned Timesaver and Sentinel Service freight trains hauled all kinds of goods on fast schedules that ran around the slow, ponderous coal drags. The railroad developed a unique personality, fostered by the fact it reached some of its destinations in roundabout ways and thus didn’t compete by the clock because it couldn’t. It made up for that with personal service that endeared it to many passengers who chose its slower trains intentionally.

      The modern merger

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1