Alarm of Canal-owners at the Success of Railroads—The Making of the Baltimore & Ohio—The “Tom Thumb” Engine—Difficulties in Crossing the Appalachians—Extension to Pittsburgh—Troubles of the Erie Railroad—This Road the First to Use the Telegraph—The Prairies Begin to be Crossed by Railways—Chicago’s First Railroad, the Galena & Chicago Union—Illinois Central—Rock Island, the First to Span the Mississippi—Proposals to Run Railroads to the Pacific—The Central Pacific Organized—It and the Union Pacific Meet—Other Pacific Roads.
All the railroad projects already related were timid projects in the beginning, with hardly a thought of ultimate greatness. Yet there were men, even in the earliest days of railroading, whose minds winged to great enterprises, whose dreams were empire-wide. Of such men was the Baltimore & Ohio born.
Baltimore, like Philadelphia, had greedily watched the success of the Erie Canal upon its completion, and noted with alarm its possible effects upon its own wharves. Philadelphia, with the wealth of the great State of Pennsylvania behind, had sought to protect herself by the construction of the long links of canal and railroad to Pittsburgh, of which you have already read. But Baltimore had no great State to call to her support. She must look to herself for strength. Out of her eminent necessity for self-preservation came men of the strength and the fibre to meet the emergency. Baltimore might have retreated from the situation, as some of the New England towns had retreated from it, and become a somnolent reminiscence of a prosperous Colonial seaport. She did nothing of the sort. Instead she made herself the terminal and inspiration of a great railroad, laid the foundations of a great and lasting growth.
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was born February 12, 1827. On the evening of that day, a little group of citizens of the sturdy old Southern metropolis gathered at the house of George Brown. Mr. Brown together with Philip E. Thomas, a distinguished merchant and philanthropist of Baltimore, had been making investigation into the possibilities of railroads. The fact that the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which was already well advanced in construction, would have its eastern terminus at the Potomac River, near Washington, brought no comfort to the merchants of Baltimore. Wonder not then, that the stern old traders of that city assembled to consider “the best means of restoring to the city of Baltimore that portion of the western trade which has lately been diverted from it by the introduction of steam navigation and other causes.” From that February day to this the corporate title of the Baltimore & Ohio has been unchanged, despite the career of the most extreme vicissitudes—long years of shadows that were almost complete despair, other years that were brilliant with success.
It was decided at the outset that the commercial supremacy of Baltimore rested on her conquest of the Appalachian Mountains, of her reaching by an easy artificial highway the almost limitless waterways of the West that linked themselves with the navigable Ohio. But for the beginning it was agreed that Cumberland, long an important point on the well-famed National Highway, and even then a centre in the coal traffic, was a far enough distant goal to be worthy of the most ambitious enterprise. Indeed a long cutting through a hill in the first section of the road proved a serious financial obstacle to the directors of the struggling railroad. But these last were men who persevered. They started to lay their track for the thirteen miles from Baltimore to Ellicott’s Mills on July 4, 1828. That occasion was honored by an old-time celebration in which the chief figure was Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, who laid the first stone of the new line. After his services were finished he said to a friend:
“I consider this among the most important things of my life, second only to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to that.” Of that act President Hadley, of Yale, has written: “One man’s life formed the connecting link between the political revolution of the one century and the industrial revolution of the other.”
No sooner had actual construction begun on the new line, than the directors found themselves beset by many difficulties. Their enterprise was then so unusual, that they went blindly, stumbling ahead in the dark. Even the construction of the track itself was experimental. It was first planned to use wooden rails hewn from oak, and these were to be mounted upon stone sleepers set in a rock ballast. The money spent in such track was obviously wasted. All such construction had to be torn out before the traffic was at all sizable, and replaced by iron rails and wooden sleepers.
But the track was the least of the company’s problems. It had gone ahead to build a railroad with a very vague conception as to its permanent motive-power. It was soon seen there, too, that horses were out of the question for hauling the passengers and freight any considerable distance. The Baltimore & Ohio Company gravely experimented at one time with a car which was carried before the wind by means of mast and sail.
Sturdy old Peter Cooper, of New York, finally solved that motive-power problem. He had been induced to buy three thousand acres of land in the outskirts of Baltimore for speculation. Requests sent by his Baltimore partners for remittances, for taxes and other charges, became so frequent that he went to the Maryland city to investigate. One glance showed him that the future of his investment rested upon the future of the struggling little railroad which was trying to poke its nose west from Baltimore. He came to the aid of its directors in their problem of motive-power.
That problem consisted, for one thing, in the practical use of a locomotive around curves of 400 feet radius. Cooper went back to New York, bought an engine with a single cylinder, rigged it on a car—not larger than a hand-car, geared it to the wheels of that car and solved the chief problem of the B. & O. His little engine—the Tom Thumb—was a primitive enough affair, but it pointed the way to these Baltimore merchants who were pinning their entire faith to their railroad project.