Historic B&O; Railroad Nears End of the Line : 158-Year-Old Carrier Will Fade Into CSX

On the 4th of July, 1828, 52 years to the day after he signed the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll pushed a shovel into the earth at Mount Claire estate just west of Baltimore and launched an industrial revolution in his young country.

That first spadeful of dirt brought a new name into the country’s economy, its traditions and its folklore--and ultimately even its Monopoly boards: the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

The 90-year-old Carroll, the last surviving signer of the declaration, then launched a raucous party as the citizens of Baltimore retired to the taverns and eating houses to toast the brash new form of transportation.

They had reason to celebrate. They were on the leading edge of technology--the country’s first railroad--while just 50 miles away, others were turning their shovels to an older transport mode.

On that same July 4, down in Georgetown, John Quincy Adams was dedicating the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which promised to make Washington’s Georgetown section and Alexandria, Va., bloom into the dominant ports between Philadelphia and the Chesapeake Bay.

But the B&O; and the other railroads that sprouted across the land rendered the canal obsolete before it was completed, and Baltimore was preserved as a major port, while Georgetown and Alexandria became bedroom suburbs of the District of Columbia.

The B&O; was Baltimore’s railroad, a source of local pride and support. Baltimore and the B&O; grew together.

But now, 158 years after its birth--and many decades after it pushed its rails through the mountain gaps at Harpers Ferry, W. Va., and Cumberland, Md., and through the Alleghenies to the Ohio River--the Baltimore & Ohio is dying.

Track, but No Identity

The name that brought the railroad to America will soon disappear from locomotives, freight cars and stationery.

Most of the track will still be there, the trains will continue to run, but the railroad won’t be the B&O; anymore. It will soon be absorbed into the holding company that owns it, with a name that sounds little like a railroad: CSX.

A spokesman announced in October that all the railroads in the Richmond, Va.-based CSX system--B&O;, the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Seaboard System Railroad--will be consolidated under the transportation division of CSX.

All the old names and their logos will disappear, and the railroads will cease to operate as separate identities.

The B&O; effectively died on Oct. 7, 1986. CSX Chairman Hays T. Watkins traveled from Richmond to break the news to Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer’s staff.

In strategy sessions with top management, Watkins insisted that CSX must be open with Baltimore and Maryland. Watkins talked with Schaefer directly on Oct. 10, and the public relations staff spread the news to area reporters and editors on Oct. 13. Letters were hand-delivered to the Maryland congressional delegation.

“We certainly were sensitive to the fact that it was significant in terms of history and spirit to that community,” said Thomas Hoppin, CSX vice president for corporate communications. “It was not something you slipped under the door. . . .We went in straight up.”

Started in 1963

The B&O; had gradually started losing its independence when it was acquired in 1963 by the C&O.; Most functions, such as operations, marketing and sales, were consolidated gradually.

But even after full consolidation in the late 1960s, and the CSX merger in 1980, the B&O; retained its name. The only loss of the B&O; personality was its distinctive logo, featuring a silhouette of the U.S. Capitol, which was replaced by the C&O;’s Chessie-the-cat on locomotives and cars. Now, under the new consolidation, even Chessie is being kicked out into the cold.

Watkins had jealously guarded the B&O; name for years, even as B&O;’s operations and employees were absorbed, partly because it was such a sensitive local issue, and partly because the original B&O; charter gave the railroad $3 million a year in tax concessions that would have to be relinquished.

“It was never worth the price, the $3 million, to risk the incurrence of a certain amount of disbelief and criticism,” Hoppin said.

But Hoppin and other officials said it gradually became obvious as they planned the new CSX that the B&O; couldn’t survive a true consolidation.

The burden of paper work alone for three separate railroads was getting to be too much, he said: three sets of tax returns, three copies of every regulatory filing, three payrolls, along with three locomotive rosters.

These costs were as much as the tax break, Hoppin said.

The name changes are essentially the final step in a major corporate reorganization that was made necessary by global economic changes, as the focus of heavy industry shifts from the East and Midwest to Japan, Hong Kong and other places the railroad doesn’t go.

Firm Has Diversified

The corporation now has branched into other areas of transportation with the purchase of a barge line, American Commercial Lines. It already owned a truck line, CMX, and is making a heavy investment in an airline, Air Atlanta.

CSX will extend its reach overseas shortly, awaiting only regulatory approval of its purchase of Sea Land Corp., a worldwide shipping company.

The railroad itself is being divided into semi-autonomous segments.

The new total-transportation CSX will work this way:

- The sales and marketing functions will become CSX Distribution Services, headquartered in Baltimore. This division will be in charge of selling transportation packages to customers, whether they need rail service, trucks, barges, air freight or warehousing.

- CSX Equipment, also based in Baltimore, will manage all rail equipment, providing freight cars for use by CSX Distribution.

- CSX Rail Transport, headquartered in Jacksonville, Fla., will run trains and maintain the railroad.

This arrangement is unusual, because it will create what amounts to a sales and marketing department that has minimal loyalty to the railroad and is based 781 miles away.

But CSX officials insist such a “transportation supermarket” approach is the only way to survive.

“There is always fear of change,” Watkins wrote to employees. “And we are making dramatic changes. But I am more afraid of not changing.”

B&O; employment has fallen from 52,000 in 1943 to 11,000 this year, and many miles of track have been trimmed back.

Left Great Legacy

But whatever its latter-day transformation, in 158 years the B&O; left a trail of history, loyalty, tall tales, literature and dreams.

The B&O; was a favorite of historians and photographers because of its rich history, rugged mountain grades and stable of distinctive locomotives.

B&O; fans relished the thunder of huge steam locomotives blasting away from the Great Lakes with ore, or roaring across the flatlands, or wandering through the coal fields, or cresting grades in West Virginia and Pennsylvania with such lyrical names as Sand Patch, 17-Mile, Cranberry and Cheat River.

Like most other American railroads, the B&O; was mainly a freight carrier, hauling steel from Pittsburgh, coal from Newcastle and thousands of items of general freight on a system that stretched from Chicago and St. Louis in the west to Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia in the east.

But it wasn’t B&O;’s freight trains that its friends will remember most. It was the elegant and civilized passenger service.

The B&O; operated the first passenger train, from Pratt Street in Baltimore to Ellicott’s Mills on May 22, 1830, using horse power, and spent much of its life promoting and perfecting the passenger train.

On July 1, 1890, a tradition was born: the Royal Blue line. Plush inside, and deep blue with gold striping outside, the Royal Blue trains were the latest in travel comfort.

They went from Washington to Jersey City, N.J., for almost six decades--although not always with the excessive luxury of the 19th Century--becoming the civilized alternative to the Pennsylva

nia Railroad’s fast, utilitarian service into New York’s Penn Station.

More Genteel Trains

For years, many travelers shunned the crowded Pennsy trains for the more relaxed, more genteel Royal Blue trains. The trip included a ferry ride from Jersey City into Manhattan.

In 1932 the B&O; inaugurated the ultimate in civilized travel: the all-Pullman Capitol Limited from Baltimore and Washington to Chicago. It was the first air-conditioned train in the East, the first in the East to be pulled by a diesel locomotive in 1937 and like all B&O; trains of the era, a pleasure on wheels.

The B&O; was not bigger or faster or richer than its rivals, the Pennsylvania, the New York Central and the Erie, but it delivered pleasant dining, beautiful scenery and friendly people.

“Daniel Willard (B&O; president from 1910 to 1941) liked to feel his trains were safer and more comfortable and probably had better food than the others,” said John F. Stover, a retired Purdue University professor now writing a B&O; history.

Even the B&O; could not stave off the inevitable as the automobile and the airplane ate into the travel market. The B&O; shocked the country on April 26, 1956, by completely abandoning the Royal Blue line in one day.

Despite a deteriorating financial situation, B&O; President Jervis Langdon in 1963 announced a new effort to save the passenger train.

“We will have net earnings from passenger traffic and will be better off for being in the passenger business,” Langdon asserted. To help keep this brave promise, Langdon recruited a 32-year-old West Point man who was to leave a mark on railroading for more than two decades, including service as the president of Amtrak--Paul Reistrup.

Set High Standards

“Jervis Langdon’s philosophy was that what they ran, they wanted to run very high class or get rid of it,” Reistrup said.

Reistrup was given two years to turn the passenger business around or abandon it. He failed, but the innovations he and his successors tried laid the groundwork for many ideas Amtrak adopted years later in its efforts to revive the passenger train with a resource the B&O; didn’t have: government money.

Reistrup introduced the showing of movies on trains, the hauling of cars on trains, the offering of promotional fares and such schemes as allowing patrons to take the train one way and fly back, among other things.

“We tried everything, and in spite of it we lost money,” Reistrup said. But he added: “We actually had fun. We led the way.”

“When Reistrup left, our marching orders were basically, get out of the losses, but do it in a way that will reflect credit on the railroad,” said William Howes, B&O;’s last director of passenger services. “We were told it had to be done with . . . class, but the result was the same.”

Train by train, Howes and his team gradually killed the passenger trains, with the understanding that the last to go would be the flagship, the Capitol Limited.

Meanwhile, they did what they could to keep the remaining passengers happy, unlike many rivals that deliberately downgraded service to discourage passengers.

Amtrak Took Over

On May 1, 1971, Amtrak took over the country’s passenger trains, including the Capitol Limited. And by then, B&O; freight operations had been mostly consolidated with C&O.;

To the end of its independent years, the B&O; attempted to run the railroad well. Discipline was tight, pride and loyalty ran high.

“We used to call it the Best & Only,” said A. William Johnson, now a vice president with the Assn. of American Railroads, who spent 37 years on the B&O; in jobs from sweeping out switches to regional superintendent. His grandfather joined B&O; in the 19th Century, his father was a 50-year B&O; man and now his son works for CSX.

“Where you find good discipline, you find loyalty,” Johnson said.

In the end, discipline and loyalty could not overcome economic fact.

Gradually, as employees retired and more functions were consolidated in non-B&O; towns, the name became the last true asset of a 158-year-old railroad. With this in mind, Watkins and the CSX crew headed for Baltimore in October on what amounted to a damage-control exercise.

The surprise was that nobody was particularly upset.

“The mayor was very understanding,” Hoppin said. And the press treated the story as a sentimental journey at best, as a curiosity at worst. “It was a non-story here in Baltimore,” said a local CSX official.

Gains Two Divisions

What Baltimore loses in a name, it gains in prestige as two of the three new CSX divisions move their headquarters to Baltimore. In addition, the city will receive a yearly cash windfall--$2 million a year in extra tax revenue, plus an additional $1 million a year for the state.

“As far as the name’s disappearing, there’s some sentimentality,” said Bernard Berkowitz, the president of the Baltimore Economic Development Corp. “What’s more important is the gain in administrative employment. . . . And $2 million is not to be laughed at.”

The B&O; name will not fully disappear for generations. Some freight cars and bridges probably won’t be repainted for decades. The B&O; Museum in Baltimore will retain its name, and the library of B&O; books--already hundreds of volumes--continues to grow.

“And nobody in their right minds thinks Parker Bros. will take B&O; off the Monopoly board,” Hoppin said.