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

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

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

When the scheme for the construction of a railroad from Baltimore to the waters of the Ohio River first began to take form, the United States had barely emerged from the Revolutionary period

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 public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

The railroad originally was as completely dissociated from steam propulsion as was the ship