Complete Certificate not signed or issued. 7991 

Ask yourself how many of these are left in the world from 1890 - 1899 in this condition, complete, and not issued?

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (reporting mark BO) was the first common carrier railroad and the oldest railroad in the United States. It operated as B&O from 1830 until 1987, when it was merged into the Chessie System; its lines are today controlled by CSX Transportation.

The railroad was founded to serve merchants from Baltimore who wanted to do business with settlers crossing the Appalachian Mountains. It would compete with several existing and proposed turnpikes and canals, including the Erie and Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Building west from the port of Baltimore, the B&O reached Sandy Hook, Maryland, in 1834; Cumberland in 1842; the Ohio River at Moundsville, Virginia, in 1852; Wheeling in 1853, and in 1857, Parkersburg, Virginia, below rapids that made navigation difficult during parts of the year.

The railroad, whose owners were Union sympathizers, proved crucial to the North's success during the American Civil War, which caused considerable damage to the system. After the Civil War, the B&O consolidated several feeder lines in Virginia and West Virginia, and expanded westward into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

At the end of 1970, the B&O operated 5,552 miles of road and 10,449 miles of track, not including the Staten Island Rapid Transit (SIRT) or the Reading Railroad and its subsidiaries. After a series of mergers, the B&O became part of the CSX Transportation (CSX) network in 1980.

The B&O is noted for its pioneering innovations in railroading. It was the first U.S. railroad to operate a steam locomotive, it built historic infrastructure, and it operated prestigious passenger trains. It gained additional fame by lending its name as one of the four railroads in the original version of the popular board game Monopoly.

The railroad did not reach the Ohio River until 1852, 24 years after the project started. Yet the Ohio River was from the beginning the destination the railroad was seeking to link with Baltimore, at the time a railroad center. By crossing the Appalachian Mountains, a technical challenge, it would link the new and booming territories of what at the time was the West, particularly Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, with the east coast rail and boat network, from Maryland northward. There was no rail link between Maryland and Virginia until the B&O opened the Harpers Ferry bridge in 1839.

Starting in 1825, the Erie Canal provided an animal-powered water facility, connecting New York City with Ohio via Lake Erie. It took ten days to travel from Buffalo, New York to New York City. The Cumberland Road, later the beginning of the federally financed National Road, provided a road link for animal-powered transport between Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac River and Wheeling, Virginia, in present-day West Virginia, on the Ohio River, when completed in 1837. It was the second paved road in the country. However, the 1831 DeWitt Clinton locomotive, running between Albany and Schenectady, New York, demonstrated speeds of 25 miles (40 km) per hour, dramatically decreasing the cost of transportation and announcing the coming end of the canal and turnpike (road) systems, many of which were never completed since they were or would soon be obsolete.

In New York, political support for the Erie Canal detracted from the prospect of building a railroad to replace it, whose full length did not open until 1844. Mountains in Pennsylvania made construction in the western part of the state expensive and technically challenging, and the Pennsylvania Railroad, linking Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, did not open its full length until 1852, and there was no rail link west from Pittsburgh to Ohio for several more years.

The fast-growing port city of Baltimore, Maryland, faced economic stagnation unless it opened a route to the western states. On February 27, 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.

Their plans worked well, despite many political problems from canal backers and other railroads. For example, only the Pennsylvania Railroad was allowed to build in its namesake state, requiring the B&O to skirt around a corner of the state, even though the Pennsylvania Railroad didn't even operate in that area of Pennsylvania.

The railroad grew from a capital base of $3 million in 1827 (equivalent to $78 million in 2022) to a large enterprise generating $2.7 million of annual profit on its 380 miles (610 km) 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 to the west, thus making the city the commercial and financial capital of the region south of Philadelphia.