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The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad is one of the oldest railroads in the United States and the first common carrier railroad. It came into being mostly because the city of Baltimore wanted to compete with the newly constructed Erie Canal (which served New York City) and another canal being proposed by Pennsylvania, which would have connected Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. At first this railroad was located entirely in the state of Maryland with an original line from the port of Baltimore west to Sandy Hook. At this point to continue westward, it had to cross into Virginia (now West Virginia) over the Potomac River, adjacent to the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. From there it passed through Virginia from Harpers Ferry to a point just west of the junction of Patterson Creek and the North Branch Potomac River where it crossed back into Maryland to reach Cumberland. From there it was extended to the Ohio River at Wheeling and a few years later also to Parkersburg, West Virginia. It is now part of the CSX Transportation (CSX) network, and includes the oldest operational railroad bridge in the USA. The B&O also included the Leiper Railroad, the first permanent horse-drawn railroad in the U.S. In later years, B&O advertising carried the motto: "Linking 13 Great States with the Nation." Part of the B&O Railroad's immortality has come from being one of the four featured railroads on the U.S. version of the board game ''Monopoly'', but it is the only railroad on the board which did not serve Atlantic City, New Jersey, directly. When CSX established the B&O Railroad Museum as a separate entity from the corporation, some of the former B&O Mount Clare Shops in Baltimore, including the Mt. Clare roundhouse, were donated to the museum while the rest of the property was sold. The B&O Warehouse at the Camden Yards rail junction in Baltimore now dominates the view over the right-field wall at the Baltimore Orioles' current home, Oriole Park at Camden Yards. At the end of 1970 B&O operated 5552 miles of road and 10449 miles of track, not including the Staten Island Rapid Transit (SIRT) or the Reading and its subsidiaries. ==History== The fast-growing port city of Baltimore, Maryland faced economic stagnation unless it opened routes to the western states, as New York had done with the Erie Canal in 1820. In 1827, twenty-five merchants and bankers studied the best means of restoring "that portion of the Western trade which has recently been diverted from it by the introduction of steam navigation." Their answer was to build a railroad—one of the first commercial lines in the world.〔An 1827 report shows the motivations of early boosters: 〕 Their plans worked well, as the railroad grew from a capital of $3 million in 1827 to a large enterprise generating $2.7 million of annual profit on its of track in 1854, with 19 million passenger miles. The railroad fed tens of millions of dollars of shipments to and from Baltimore and its growing hinterland, thus making the city the commercial and financial capital of the region south of Philadelphia. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Baltimore and Ohio Railroad」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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