Baltimore and Ohio Railroad timetable

Resource Type: Image | Posted on 9th March 2012 by Liam Physick

This is a timetable, dating from 20th May 1830, from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The Baltimore and Ohio, known as the B&O, was one of the oldest railways in the United States, and linked Baltimore, Maryland to the Ohio River at Wheeling (then in Virginia, now in West Virginia), and was later extended to Parkersburg, also now in West Virginia (West Virginia split off from Virginia in the American Civil War, when it opposed secession). It was set up because it was necessary for Baltimore, as a fast-growing port, to connect with the western states, as New York had done by opening the Erie Canal in 1820. In 1827,  group of 25 businessmen decided that the best way was to build a railway: the Maryland General Assembly authorised the creation of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on 28th February that year, and the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road Company was chartered by Virginia on 8th March. Construction began on 4th July - Independence Day - 1828 and opened on 24th May 1830: several extensions were made, with the Wheeling terminus being opened on 1st January 1853, and in 1835, a Washington Branch, connecting the Railroad to the federal capital, was opened. The Company supported the Union in the Civil War (Maryland was a slave state, but remained loyal to the Union, although many Marylanders sympathised with the Confederacy - among them was John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln) and was of major strategic importance in that conflict, as it connected Washington, DC to the North. The B&O suffered 143 raids by Southern forces. In later years, the B&O incorporated many smaller railways. Since 1987, it has been part of the CSX Transportation. This image was donated to Metal by the B&O Railroad Museum, which opened on 4th July 1953 (as the Baltimore and Ohio Transportation Museum), and which displays railway artefacts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including 250 pieces of rolling stock, four nineteenth-century buildings and one mile of track, on which rides are offered from Wednesday to Sunday from April to December, and on weekends in January. In 1961, it was designated a National Historic Landmark. Its website can be found at www.borail.org

Tagged under: heritage railways, rolling stock, canals, timetables, slavery, american civil war, baltimore and ohio railroad, erie canal, b&o railroad museum

Categorised under: Landmarks, Landscapes & Locomotives