Now the Baltimore-Washington end of Amtrak’s busy, high-speed Northeast Corridor route, the original Baltimore & Potomac Railroad (B&P) had never intended to be anything of the sort. The railroad was first conceived in 1853 by Oden Bowie and his fellow Southern Maryland tobacco growers, looking for a better way to get their product to market than dirt wagon roads. They planned a line from Baltimore directly south to the Potomac River at Pope’s Creek, Maryland, passing through Upper Marlboro, Brandywine, and La Plata. The company’s charter also included the right to build branches up to 20 miles long as gathering lines. That inoffensive provision would later transform the railroad into something entirely different.

Bowie got nowhere. The prospect of a bucolic railroad hauling mostly a seasonal agricultural business was financially alluring to no one. Surveys did not even start until 1859, and Bowie’s appeal for aid to the Baltimore & Ohio’s (B&O) President John W. Garrett got a polite brush off--a response Garrett would regret soon enough.

The project languished through the Civil War, but then events took a sudden, surprising turn. Back in the early 1830s, the Maryland legislature had effectively given the B&O a monopoly in the Baltimore-Washington market, and the railroad formed the sole southern link in the chain of railroads between New York, Washington, and the South. But the B&O’s chief competitor, the ambitious, aggressive, and powerful Pennsylvania Railroad, had its own designs on that trade. Since 1861, it controlled the Northern Central Railway, which entered Baltimore from Harrisburg, and it was also moving to swallow the rail lines between Philadelphia and New York.

The Pennsylvania was stymied south of Baltimore--the state, having invested in the B&O’s monopoly, refused to grant a charter. Enter Oden Bowie, B&P’s first president, who pointed out that his Baltimore & Potomac’s charter allowed branch lines up to 20 miles long and by building the railroad through present-day Bowie, a “branch” could be built into Washington within the charter limitations. Instantly, the Pennsylvania Railroad took a deep interest in the tobacco farmers’ welfare, pumping money into and thereby seizing control of the B&P. Construction work started in 1867, and in 1872 the line was complete between Washington and the outskirts of Baltimore.

At the same time, thanks to its ally in Congress, Senator Simon Cameron, the Pennsylvania obtained rights to the railroad bridge over the Potomac, walling off the Baltimore & Ohio from its southern connections. Keeping its pledge to the Southern Marylanders, the Pennsylvania also built the originally planned B&P main line from Bowie to Pope’s Creek. This proceeded at a slower pace and was finished in April 1873.

In the same year, it completed a long series of tunnels to bring the B&P into the north side of Baltimore, where it built a union passenger station on the site of present Penn Station. It also helped build a connecting line (including another tunnel) to the still-independent Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore (PW&B), so that through-trains could be run between Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. And as a final blow to the B&O, the Pennsylvania snatched up the PW&B in 1881, temporarily removing the B&O from the Philadelphia and New York markets. (John Garrett soon built his own line, but the Pennsylvania remained the dominant carrier well into the first half of the twentieth century.)

The Baltimore & Potomac name lasted until 1902, when the Pennsylvania Railroad folded it and the PW&B together as the Philadelphia, Baltimore & Washington--which in turn disappeared as an operating entity in 1916. John W. Garrett remained haunted by the specter of Oden Bowie’s hat-in-hand visit until he died.

Burgess, George H. and Miles C. Kennedy Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania Railroad Co., 1949.

Roberts, Charles S. and David W. Messer Triumph VI: Philadelphia, Columbia, Harrisburg to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Baltimore: Barnard, Roberts & Co., 2003.