Straight Lines and Crooked Rates
Straight Lines and Crooked Rates
When the B&O finally opened its tracks to the Ohio River in 1853, it encountered economic conditions very different from those that had prevailed in 1828, when it laid its first rails. Other railroad companies that had formed in its wake now vied for the trade of the West as well. For officials and stockholders in the B&O, this prompted a reconsideration of the company’s goals and practices. When the company began to adopt discriminatory rates that charged more to goods bound for Baltimore than for those bound for Philadelphia or New York, it prompted debates about what the railroad owed to the municipal public that had funded its construction for the past twenty-five years.
Keywords: railroads, economic geography, rate discrimination, through trade, labor, strikes
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