So, the first time I heard of the B&O Railroad was when I was playing Monopoly during a power outage. I didn’t think about it being necessarily a real thing. (In the same vein, I just assumed the Reading Railroad on Monopoly was just a play on the TV show “Reading Rainbow.” I was not a clever child.) But with years comes experience, and experience teaches you a few things, like how the B&O is a railway that is steeped in molding historic America, and deserves recognition and respect.
It was one of the first railways built in the states and built initially to compete with New York’s Erie Canal transport route. It soon grew to become one of the backbones of early era transport, providing easy commercial transit from the east to northern Midwest and, when the Civil War began, being one of the reasons the less coordinated Union troops were able to outmaneuver the Confederacy. Though defunct now, its memory lives on in its history and within the B&O Historical Museum in Baltimore. We hope that this new knife from Case does a justice to the legacy of the railroad that helped shape the country.