America’s oldest railroad and its two successors are nearing 200 years of operations as of 2024. Of the three
companies, the Baltimore & Ohio currently has the far longest history. However, in the period 1971 through
1994, its identity gradually disappeared as it yielded to Chessie, a combination of Baltimore & Ohio,
Chesapeake & Ohio and Western Maryland. In turn, Chessie yielded to an even larger entity, CSX, which
combined Chessie with the railroads of the Seaboard System. And yet, an observer standing trackside on
October 29th, 1994 at Terra Alta as R316 shook the ground with one of GE’s newest offerings, CSX C40-8 7588,
leading a GP40-2/SD50 set with three SD50’s 8605/8701/8608 pushing, probably noticed CA Tower which was erected in
1923 to replace a decades-old wood tower that burned down. CA was no longer manned. Control of the area’s trackage
was now vested in a distant office but this vestige of the B&O still endured. Indeed, another West End tower, Hardman,
was still functioning. And so it was. Here and there, even as the capitol emblem disappeared, one could still find remnants
of the B&O; towers, stations, bridges, company service rolling stock, coaling towers and even a “circular” round house.
Sometimes B&O/Chessie/CSX were the target of a specific trip and sometimes they were encountered on a
trip to another carrier or city. Given their distance from the author’s home and work requirements, many of
these locations were visited only once or twice. Thus photographic coverage of many locations is not nearly as
extensive as that provided by someone who lived in the area. Furthermore, this is not a comprehensive
photographic survey of B&O/Chessie/CSX locations in the overall period of the book much less in each of the
three eras.
This book ventures through sections of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia. There are many
photographic gaps, such as the Magnolia Cutoff, Cheat River and Newburg Grades, Glenwood Yard, and the
Wheeling & Pittsburgh Subdivision; not to mention more coverage of metropolitan areas like Philadelphia and
Baltimore, etc. Thirty-eight locations have images and historical text. In addition, there is historical text relating to many
other sites along the eastern side of a railroad that once boasted “Linking 13 Great States With The Nation”. This is
basically an “outsider’s” view of a wide geographic section of a major system.
