With the reorganization of 1898 finished, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad entered a new period in its history.

Great men are usually the products of their times and one of the men developed by these times takes rank with the greatest railroad leaders in history.

Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned and separately managed.

The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad. One transformed millions of acres of uncultivated land into fertile farms, while the other furnished the transportation which carried the crops to distant markets.

Horses and mules, and even sail cars, made more rapid progress than did the earliest locomotive.

People began to understand that with the acquisition of California the nation had obtained practically half a continent, of which the future possibilities were almost unlimited, so far as the development of natural resources and the genera production of wealth were concerned.

In the United States three new methods of transportation made their appearance at almost the same time - the steamboat, the canal boat, and the rail car