page_title: Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad
section_title: Operations
hierarchical_section_title: Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad / Operations
caption_attribution_description: English: "Map of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, &amp; Baltimore Railroad shewing [sic] its connections." Sketch map showing the area between Philadelphia and Baltimore indicating drainage, cities and towns, roads, and railroads. Published in the 1850s.
context_page_description: The Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad was an American railroad company itself a result of merger of four small lines dating from the earliest days of American railroading in the late 1820s and early 1830s, that operated from 1836, until being bought by a larger regional line in 1881, with a merger into a longer Northeast Corridor railway in 1902. It built the first rail line south from Philadelphia into The South.
  Founded in 1831 as the Philadelphia and Delaware County Rail-Road Company, the PW&B had within six years changed its name and merged with three other state-chartered railroads in three Middle Atlantic states to create a single line between Philadelphia and Baltimore. In 1881, the PW&B came under the control of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the larger one of then two dominant rail line companies in the Northeast United States.
  An 1895 historian of the PRR had this to say about the significance of the PW&B, which it had acquired and gained control of fourteen years before:
context_section_description: The year 1836 saw several milestones. The 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. The bridge would cross at Gray's Ferry Bridge, south of the city. Meanwhile, on April 18, the D&M merged with the W&S, forming the Wilmington and Susquehanna Railroad Company.
  Work proceeded in Delaware and Maryland as well. 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. On January 15, 1838, the PW&B opened service to Wilmington from Gray's Ferry, then a few miles south of Philadelphia's city limits.
  The disadvantages of tripartite ownership of the Philadelphia-Baltimore line having become obvious, the three remaining state-chartered railroads merged on February 12, 1838, to form the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Company. (The new company's name differed from its predecessor's in that "The" at the beginning of the titled name was not part of its formal incorporated name.)
  Among the passengers that year was Frederick Douglass, (1808-1895), a former Eastern Shore farm slave and later Fells Point ships' caulker, who escaped his Baltimore owner by boarding a PB&W train, perhaps at a Canton station or along the line in the vicinity, (further east of the future 1849-1850 historic President Street Station at President and Fleet Streets, which is east of "The Basin" of Baltimore's Harbor), and riding it northeast to Havre de Grace, Perryville, Wilmington and then 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, 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. That 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.
  The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) began using the tracks that same year to offer service northeast of Baltimore to Philadelphia.
caption: 1850s era map of the PW&B Railroad
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