On February 28, 1827, the state of Maryland chartered the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to build tracks from the port of Baltimore west to the Ohio River. Their motivation? Panic.

Two years earlier New York State had completed construction of the hugely successful Erie Canal, connecting Atlantic cities to the Great Lakes. Maryland must compete or be left behind, civic leaders argued. Building a rival 340-mile canal would cost at least $22 million.

Now, for perhaps half that sum, the B&O would transport freight and passengers across as many of the twenty-four states and western territories as possible, promised president Philip E. Thomas. And, steel rails would hustle goods between the East Coast and Midwest much faster than any canal.

So, with five million dollars in initial capital, the first commercial railway in the United States was born. Construction began Independence Day, 1828. For all practical purposes, it never ceased. As Mark Twain wrote, “A railroad is like a lie. You have to keep building it to make it stand.” Laying the 379-mile main stem alone took three decades.

“The engineering problems facing the projected railway were so varied that a railway editor called it the ‘Railroad University’ of the nation,” writes historian John F. Stover. Connecting Baltimore, then the nation’s second largest city, with the Ohio River, meant either eliminating mountains or laying track across them. Periodic flooding washed out most of the original stones bridges until they were reinforced with trusses.

By 1858, annual revenues exceeded $4 million. Still, the Erie Canal carried more than ten times the combined freight tonnage of all the railroads in New York State.

The Civil War changed everything. Armies needed supplies faster and farther afield than they could travel by canal-and they needed them on a reliable schedule. Though the B&O suffered “an unenviable position” as a southern railroad reliant on northern clients, business to neighboring Washington, D.C. increased exponentially. In the 1850s, a busy day sent ten B&O freight cars to the capital. By 1861 that number was 200.

Competitors multiplied between the Civil War and turn of the century. The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, blocked B&O access to Philadelphia and New York, and in 1872, exploiting a loophole in the B&O’s Maryland charter, built its own Baltimore-Washington connection. Meanwhile, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines joined to create the first transcontinental railroad. The B&O-itself soon a 1,700-mile system with revenues of nearly $20 million-expanded west and north as fast as possible. By 1871, it offered direct connection to Columbus and Pittsburgh, in 1893 to Chicago and St. Louis, and in 1895 to Philadelphia. This last effort, however, proved financial ruin-a year later the B&O declared bankruptcy.

Shipping titan CSX now owns the old B&O network, including the world’s oldest operational railroad bridge, a small part of roughly 21,000 route miles in 25 states and provinces, not to mention 70 ocean, river, and lake ports. The company’s 100,000-plus freight car fleet, the third largest in the country, serves industries from coal to chemicals, agricultural products to automobiles, food to forest products.

Last financial quarter, CSX sales rose to a record $2.6 billion. On average, the company’s stock market value has doubled every fifteen months since 1980. This year, given rising fuel costs have hit trucking hardest, CSX chief executive Michael J. Ward expects shipping volume to rise again even as he plans five percent price increases.

Changing times ultimately cost the Baltimore & Ohio its independence. Yet, it was the B&O itself that led that change, reminds John F. Stover. The railroad, he concludes, “helped transform an agrarian and undeveloped society into the industrial urban economy of the twentieth century.” Fitting, then, that today it is a best-selling celebration of cutthroat modern economics-the board game Monopoly-that has kept the Baltimore & Ohio name alive for millions. In Monopoly, the B&O boasts its own square between Illinois and Atlantic Avenues. Here, at last, the railroad is immortal. wt