B&O Railroad Launches: America's Passenger Era Begins

Horses pulled the first passenger cars down iron rails in Baltimore, and the age of the American railroad began. On May 24, 1830, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad inaugurated regular passenger service on a 13-mile stretch of track between Baltimore and Ellicott's Mills, Maryland, becoming the first common-carrier railroad in the United States to offer scheduled service to the public. Baltimore's merchants had conceived the railroad out of commercial desperation. New York had the Erie Canal. Philadelphia was building canal connections to the Ohio Valley. Baltimore had neither navigable waterways nor flat terrain, and its merchants feared the city would be bypassed in the race to tap interior markets. In 1827, a group of Baltimore businessmen chartered the B&O with the audacious goal of building a railroad to the Ohio River, 380 miles across the Appalachian Mountains. The early service was primitive. Horse-drawn cars carried passengers at about 12 miles per hour over wooden rails topped with iron straps. Peter Cooper's experimental steam engine, the Tom Thumb, ran a famous demonstration on the same line in August 1830 but lost a celebrated race to a horse-drawn car when a belt slipped. Reliable steam power would come within two years. The B&O proved that railroads could work in America. Passenger revenue covered costs almost immediately, and the company pushed westward, reaching the Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia, in 1853. More importantly, the B&O model inspired a railroad construction boom that transformed the American economy. By 1860, the United States had over 30,000 miles of track. Railroads did more than move freight and people. They standardized time zones, created national markets, and enabled the settlement of the continental interior faster than any technology before or since.