May 24, 1830 First Passenger Railroad Service Ran from Balitmore to Ellicott's Mills, Md

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) was one of the oldest railroads in the United States and the first common carrier railroad with an original line from the port of Baltimore, Maryland west to the Ohio River at Wheeling and a few years later also to Parkersburg, West Virginia. It is now part of the CSX network, and includes the oldest operational railroad bridge in the world. The B&O also included the Leiper Railroad, the first permanent railroad in the U.S. In later years, B & O advertising carried the motto: "Linking 13 Great States with the Nation." Part of the B&O Railroads immortality has come from being one of the 4 featured railroads on the U.S. version of the board game Monopoly, but it is the only railroad on the board which did not directly serve Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Philip E. Thomas and George Brown were the pioneers of the railroad. They spent the year 1826 investigating railway
enterprises in England, which were at that time being tested in a comprehensive fashion as commercial ventures. Their
investigation completed, they held an organizational meeting on February 12, 1827, including about twenty-five citizens, most of whom were Baltimore merchants or bankers. Chapter 123 of the 1826 Session Laws of Maryland, passed February 28, 1827, and the Commonwealth of Virginia on March 8, 1827, chartered the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road Company, with the task of building a railroad from the port of Baltimore, Maryland west to a suitable point on the Ohio River. The railroad, formally incorporated April 24, was intended to provide not only an alternative to, but also a faster route for Midwestern goods to reach the East Coast than the hugely successful, but slow Erie Canal across upstate New York. Thomas was elected as the first president and Brown the treasurer. The capital of the proposed company was fixed at five million dollars.

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