Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad


The Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad was an American railroad, headquartered in Philadelphia, that operated in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland from 1836 to 1902. It was part of an 1838 merger of four state-chartered railroads in three Mid-Atlantic states that created a single line between Philadelphia and Baltimore. Through purchases, leases and other arrangements it created a wider network of operations, including down the Delmarva Peninsula.
In 1881, the PW&B was purchased by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was at the time the nation's largest railroad. In 1902, the PRR merged it into its Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington Railroad.
The right-of-way laid down by the PW&B line is still in use today as part of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and the Maryland Department of Transportation's MARC commuter passenger system from Baltimore to Maryland's northeast corner. Freight is hauled on the route, formerly by the Conrail system and currently by Norfolk Southern.

History

The PW&B started as four railroads:
  • The Philadelphia and Delaware Counties Rail-Road Company, chartered by the General Assembly of Pennsylvania on April 2, 1831
  • The Wilmington and Susquehanna Rail Road Company, chartered by the state of Delaware on January 18, 1832
  • The Baltimore and Port Deposite Rail Road Company, chartered by the state of Maryland on March 5, 1832
  • The Delaware and Maryland Rail Road Company, chartered by Maryland on March 14, 1832
These grew from efforts by the three mid-Atlantic states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland to create a rail line between Philadelphia and Baltimore. Pennsylvania was seeking to improve transportation between Philadelphia and points south along the Atlantic coast and Eastern seaboard, and so the legislature chartered the P&DC in 1831 and allotted $200,000 to build a rail line from America's largest city to the Delaware state line. Further south, across the Mason–Dixon line, the Delaware and Maryland legislatures, were doing their part to create a rail link to Wilmington and Baltimore. Less than a year later, the State of Delaware chartered the W&S and allotted $400,000 to build a rail line from Wilmington to the Maryland state line. At almost the same time, the State of Maryland chartered the B&PD to build from Baltimore northeast the western bank of the Susquehanna River and the D&M to build from Port Deposit or any other point on the Susquehanna's eastern river bank north to the Delaware line.
In July 1835, the W&S hired architect/surveyor William Strickland to make a preliminary survey to the southwest between Wilmington and North East, Maryland. In October, the surveyors reported that the best option, a 17-mile line, would cost $233,000 to build. That same year, the B&PD began operating trains between Baltimore Harbor's basin at the present-day Inner Harbor waterfront and its Canton industrial, commercial, and residential neighborhood to the southeast. But Matthew Newkirk, who had invested $50,000 in the B&PD, including funds borrowed from the United States Bank, grew impatient. On Oct. 6, he wrote to the company's board "demanding that Pres. Finley resign and be replaced by someone who will be more aggressive in collecting from delinquent subscribers and pushing project forward." As alternates, Newkirk suggested Roswell L. Colt or lawyer John H. B. Latrobe, the brother of Chief Engineer Benjamin H. Latrobe II and grandson of architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Six days later, Colt became president, but he was replaced five weeks later by Lewis Brantz.
In 1836, P&DC opened its first segment of track; saw its allowable expenditures upped by the state to $400,000; and changed its name, on March 14, to The Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Company. On July 4, the PW&B began building its bridge over the Schuylkill River, the most significant obstacle on its part of the route and completed their entire line, but for the bridge, in 1837. The Schuulkill River bridge crossed at Gray's Ferry Bridge, south of the city and was opened in 1838.
Work also proceeded in Delaware and Maryland where on April 18, 1836 the D&M merged with the W&S, forming the Wilmington and Susquehanna Railroad Company. By July 1837, there was continuous track from Baltimore to Wilmington, broken only by the wide Susquehanna River, which trains crossed by steam-powered ferryboats at Havre de Grace to Perryville. That year, the railroad ordered seven 4-2-0 steam locomotives from Norris Locomotive Works; it would order two more in or about 1840.

1838: Merger

On January 15, 1838, the PW&B began service from Wilmington to Gray's Ferry, then a few miles south of Philadelphia's city limits. Passengers debarking at Gray's Ferry were taken by omnibus into the city.
The disadvantages of tripartite ownership of the Philadelphia-Baltimore line became obvious, and the three remaining state-chartered railroads merged on February 12, 1838, to form the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Company.
Among the passengers that year was Frederick Douglass, a slave who escaped his Baltimore owner by boarding a PB&W train, perhaps at Canton or somewhere east of where the President Street Station would be built in 1849, and riding it northeast to Philadelphia. To avoid detention, Douglass, a future world-famous abolitionist, statesman, Federal official, orator and publisher, borrowed a "seaman's protection", a document obtained by his future wife, a free black woman, which was normally carried by free black sailors, of which there were many in the merchant fleets and the navy. Later, the railroad would require black passengers to have "a responsible white person" sign a bond at the ticket office before allowing them to board.
In December 1838, the PB&W completed its Schuylkill bridge at Gray's Ferry. Named the "Newkirk Viaduct" after PW&B president Matthew Newkirk, it allowed trains to run from downtown Philadelphia to downtown Baltimore, with only the Susquehanna River steam railroad ferry interrupting the ride. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad began using the tracks that same year to offer service northeast of Baltimore to Philadelphia.
The Susquehanna interruption was eventually bridged under pressure of the heavy traffic needs in 1864–5, the later days of the Civil War. After a disastrous storm damaged the new spans, reconstruction began anew and was completed by 1866. In November 1866, the Susquehanna River was bridged at last by the PW&B Bridge, a 3,269-foot wooden truss, finally creating a continuous rail connection between Philadelphia and Baltimore.
In Baltimore, the PW&B's terminus and business office sat at the southwest corner of President and Fleet Streets, east of the Jones Falls, the eventual future site of the President Street Station. The line ran east along Fleet Street, turned southeast onto Boston Street and ran along the waterfront past Canton before turning northeast and leaving the city limits, heading east, then northeast towards the Susquehanna.
In Philadelphia, the line ended at Broad Street and Prime Avenue, which is now Washington Avenue, where it connected with the Southwark Rail-Road, built in 1835, to reach the Delaware River.
In 1839, the railroad's ticket agents advertised daily mail-and-passenger trains that left Baltimore's old original Pratt Street station at South Charles Street of the B&O at 9:30 a.m., stopped for lunch in Wilmington, Delaware, and reached the Market Street depot in Philadelphia at 4 p.m.
In 1844, Samuel Morse arranged for the B&O line to reach Washington, D.C., from Philadelphia and Baltimore by agreeing to allow the builder to use the PW&B right-of-way in exchange for the use of the communications equipment.

Expansion into Delaware

The PB&W expanded into Delaware on March 15, 1839, when it purchased the New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad which ran from New Castle, Delaware, to Frenchtown, Maryland. However, it took 13 years to connect this line to the rest of the PW&B system. To bridge this gap, the New Castle and Wilmington Railroad was chartered in 1839 and opened in late 1852. To expand the railroad south into the Delmarva Peninsula, the PW&B financed construction of the Delaware Railroad, which in 1856 connected to the combined lines at Bear, Delaware. The PW&B took over operations of the Delaware RR on January 1, 1857. In 1859, the NC&F was abandoned west of the junction with the Delaware Railroad at Bear. By 1866, these moves and others allowed the PW&B to dominate the Delmarva Peninsula rail market.

1840s-1870s

In 1842, Newkirk resigned as PW&B president. He was replaced by Matthew Brooke Buckley, who had become a PW&B board member on Jan. 10, 1842, and one week later had taken over leadership of one of the railroad's three executive committees, the Northern one. As president, Buckley helped create the first telegraph line.
On January 12, 1846, Buckley was replaced by Edward C. Dale, a grandson of Richard Dale, one of the U.S. Navy's first commodores.
Between 1846 and 1849, the railroad ordered five more locomotives, likely 4-4-0s, from the Norris Works.
In February 1850, the PW&B improved its Baltimore terminus with a new station with a 208-foot barrel-vaulted train shed. Because locomotives were not allowed to transfer through the city—possibly for fire safety reasons—service onward to Washington was facilitated by drawing the coaches by horse down Pratt Street to the B&O terminal, first at East Pratt and South Charles Streets, and, after 1857, to the new Camden Street Station. Unwieldy as it was, the arrangement allowed the railroads to temporarily compete with the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad on routes going west from Philadelphia. By 1853, the Camden and Amboy Railroad and New Jersey Railroad were also part of this agreement, providing through service from New York City to the West.
In 1861, one week after the American Civil War began at Fort Sumter, an angry mob of Southern sympathizers attacked a trainload of future Union Army soldiers at the PW&B's President Street Station, starting a street battle that spread to the Camden Street Station. This Pratt Street Riot produced the war's first deaths of Union volunteers by hostile action and set the nation irrevocably on the path to war.
From 1863 to 1865, the railroad ordered ten 4-4-0 locomotives from the Norris Works.