Early Locomotives: One Hundred Years of Railroad Development 1927 Eastman Kodak Company

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‘Made at the Pageant of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad “The Fair of the Iron Horse”… History of transportation.’ Includes famous locomotives Tom Thumb, York, DeWitt Clinton, Atlantic, Thomas Jefferson, Memnon, Thatcher Perkins, & J.C. Davis.

Public domain film from the Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.

The film was silent. I have added music created by myself using the Reaper Digital Audio Workstation and the Independence and Proteus VX VST instrument plugins.

…In 1927 B&O celebrated its centennial with the Fair of the Iron Horse, a pageant and exhibition at Halethorpe, Maryland. Much of the rolling stock exhibited there was from B&O’s museum collection, which formed the nucleus of the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, one of the earliest railroad museums….

The B&O Railroad Museum is a museum exhibiting historic railroad equipment in Baltimore, Maryland, originally named the Baltimore & Ohio Transportation Museum when it opened on July 4, 1953. It has been called one of the most significant collections of railroad treasures in the world and has the largest collection of 19th-century locomotives in the U.S. The museum is located in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s old Mount Clare Station and adjacent roundhouse, part of the B&O’s sprawling Mount Clare Shops site begun in 1829, the oldest railroad manufacturing complex in the United States.

Mount Clare is considered to be a birthplace of American railroading, as the site of the first regular railroad passenger service in the U.S., beginning on May 22, 1830…

…Railroads (as they are known in the US) were built on a far larger scale than those in Continental Europe, both in terms of the distances covered and also in the loading gauge adopted, which allowed for heavier locomotives and double-deck trains. The railroad era in the United States began in 1830 when Peter Cooper’s locomotive, Tom Thumb, first steamed along 13 miles (21 km) of Baltimore and Ohio railroad track. In 1833, the nation’s second railroad ran 136 miles (219 km) from Charleston to Hamburg in South Carolina. Not until the 1850s, though, did railroads offer long distance service at reasonable rates. A journey from Philadelphia to Charleston involved eight different gauges, which meant that passengers and freight had to change trains seven times. Only at places like Bowling Green, Kentucky, the railroads were connected to one another.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that opened in 1830 was the first to evolve from a single line to a network in the United States. By 1831, a steam railway connected Albany and Schenectady, New York, a distance of 16 miles, which was covered in 40 minutes.

The years between 1850 and 1890 saw phenomenal growth in the US railroad system, which at its peak constituted one third of the world’s total mileage. Although the American Civil War placed a temporary halt to major new developments, the conflict did demonstrate the enormous strategic importance of railways at times of war. After the war, major developments include the first elevated railway built in New York in 1867 as well as the symbolically important first transcontinental railroad completed in 1869…