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

Consequently many large railroad systems of heavy capitalization bid fair to run into difficulties on the first serious falling off in general business

The States which form the northern border of the United States westward from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast include an area several times larger than France and could contain ten Englands and still have room to spare.

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.

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.

Farmers, merchants, manufacturers, and the traveling public have all had their troubles with the transportation lines, and the difficulties to which these struggles have given rise have produced that problem which is even now apparently far from solution.

In the decade before the Civil War various north and south lines of railway were projected and some of these were assisted by grants of land from the Federal Government