First, Wheeling was in Virginia until West Virginia was admitted as the 35th State in the Union June 20, 1863.
What I am interested in finding out is what was / is the route that the B &O RR took to get to Wheeling. So far, Googling will show the extent of the B & O system at about that time. Baltimore and Ohio Railroad - Wikipedia
Another B & O site, there maybe maps but I can’t find them: http://borail.net/ This site does give some useful information; when the B & O got to various locations.
For a little background: many historians in chronicling the increasingly tense times leading up to the the Civil war (US) mention the disproportional industrialization of the Northern states. One factoid that often gets mentioned is that the B & O didn’t reach Wheeling until the 1850’s. The various sources usually go on to contrast the comparative growth of rail mileage in the Northern states to that in the Southern States.
Considering that building railroads was done completely by manual methods at the time and for a long time afterwards, I think that it would be very interesting to learn more about how the B & O got through the Appalachian Mountains.
I will say that in researching this question, I myself have learned a great deal that I didn’t know previously.
Thank you for for any contributions you care to make.
Having nothing better to do than ruin my eyes, I tried to read the old map and find the places on Google Maps.
It’s way to complicated to give a turn by turn account, but the line (like a lot of railroads east of the Great Plains) basically follows rivers and valleys: Youghiogeny River, Chisholm Run, Snowy Creek, Saltlick Creek, Spruce Run, Cheat River, etc.
Up the Potomac river from Martinsburg to Cumberland. There’s a gap in the Appalachians where the river comes through, no need for cuttings and tunnels.
But it turns off at Cumberland, to follow the Savage River up to where Savage River Dam is now, and goes up a little tributaries valley to Terra Alta , where it crosses over the ridges to Tunnelton and down another little value to Grafton, where its beside the Ohio river.
Grafton to Wheeler was then north up the east bank of the Ohio to meet the Ohio railway at the bridge near Wheeler, Hence connecting Ohio to Baltimore.
You say its manual work , so how was it possible ? More like, it was kinda simple, so no fancy engineering, just lay them tracks… except the Tunnel at Tunnelton ?
No fancy engineering - it travels twice the distance a crow flies, because it meanders with the rivers and curved around it use the gap at Terra Alta
Oops, no its Moundsville to Wheeler up the Ohio River.
Grafton to Fairmont is up the east bank of the Monongahela River.
Then Fairmont to Farrington and Mannington. There the railway is not used any longer, but route 250 follows a long meandering valley and that road has the remains of a railway beside it through to Cameron, and then down to Moundsville somehow. route 250, the road, takes a long meandering route down to Moundsville, so I suspect 250 is it from Moundsville to Cameron and Mannington.
NO. that is highly simplified. Where meanders would have made the map too messy, he just left them out. For example, the railway is shown a great distance from rivers, while it actually went down the river bank for the reason that the river flattens the terrain.
I grew up in Wheeling. My school bus stop was right by the train tracks in Elm Grove. That branch of the B&O went from Wheeling to Pittsburgh, IIRC.
I rode the train to school a couple of times (Note - NEVER EVER do this - if you slip and fall you’ll be crushed under the wheels, or cut in half, or something equally bad). We used to walk along the tracks to take a shortcut to school (again, something you should never ever do). Twice we got caught on a trestle when the train came.
The rails are long gone, and the pipe factory that used to be next to the tracks is now a shopping center. Even the train trestles are gone.
The trains used to have a lot of coal cars and a lot of box cars, many of which said B&O on the side, with a few tankers and other cars. Other cars would be marked Chesapeake and Ohio or Chessie Systems. There also used to be an old train station that was mostly abandoned. It had a few old passenger cars that were slowly rusting away.
Kunilou, I’ll try finding those water ways and see if that corresponds to what Isilder has to say.
Mr. Downtown, Ooh yeah that David Rumsey site looks very promising. I wonder if it will also help me with some of my other industrial archaeological interests.
Isilder, you make it sound as if the original route is no longer in use, none the less you have given me some way points and I will see how well that corresponds to what Kunilou has said.
Note, Kunilou, Isilder, you have given different frames of reference, I am hoping for some synthesis. I hope that it does not appear that I am casting aspersions on either of the two, nor upon either of you.
Engineer_comp_geek, At one point in my life I was going through Wheeling both East and West along US 250 and I 70. My most vivid memory is of the old two lane John A. Robling suspension bridge between Bridgeport OH and Wheeling.
Again, I want thank all of you for taking the time to respond.
Different frames of reference, but a lot of overlap. Both Isilder and I note Tunnelton, and the “little tributaries valley to Terra Alta” that Islider mentions is Snowy Creek.
There is a map of the old railways at OpenRailwayMap.org. From plotting the stops on your 1860 map into google maps it seems to have all of the tracks from the B&O on it.
Have you tried looking at the USGS Historical Maps? They don’t go back to the time you want, but you can find maps dating back to the 1880s forward. They are going to be pretty accurate on where the railroads were so you might be able to work backwards from there. You can also download them free of charge and you can get them to open in Google Earth.
I’ve done some work with the older maps, overlaying them in Google Earth and such, and I’ve found them be to more accurate then I had actually thought they would be. I thought they would be off by quite a bit, but looking at known locations they are only off by a few hundred feet a lot of times.