Such a clumsy arrangement could not last forever. About fifty years ago it ended in a first-class row between the two chief parties to it. The P. W. & B. had passed into the hands of the Pennsylvania, which also acquired control of the Northern Central, leading from Baltimore straight north through York and Harrisburg and Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to Elmira, New York, and so on to the south shore of Lake Ontario. The Northern Central and the P. W. & B. began picking quarrels with the Baltimore & Ohio, which had some very obdurate habits of its own. Things went from bad to worse. For a time the trains of the former connecting roads took a keen delight in missing their connections at Baltimore City (to use the old name of the town), and it all finally came to pass that the roads ceased issuing through tickets over each other's rails--a method of reprisal wherein the traveler paid the bill.
Out of this mêlée there grew a phase of competition which developed rapidly into the construction of parallel railroads. The Pennsylvania cut an enormously expensive series of tunnels under Baltimore and built the Union Station out on Charles Street in the newer portion of the town--recently superseded by the present station of that name. From that station it built the Baltimore and Potomac on to its own new terminal in Washington City (also old-style) where it enjoyed valuable exclusive connections with the important railroads leading south from the Potomac. After which it was free and independent of the Baltimore and Ohio for its all-important New York-Philadelphia-Washington business, while the link of the Northern Central between Baltimore and its main line at Harrisburg gave it a chance to get competitive business between both Washington and Baltimore and the West.
To this sharp blow the Baltimore and Ohio retaliated, though slowly. It never was able to finance itself quite as readily as its larger adversary. Gradually it too tunneled under Baltimore--went far ahead of the Pennsylvania, in fact, in that premier electric installation to which I already have referred--and opened its handsome Mount Royal Station within a few blocks of the Union Station. It extended its line on from Mount Royal for ninety-five miles to Philadelphia, paralleling and in sharp competition with the P. W. & B. property of the Pennsylvania. It obtained an advantageous terminal site in Philadelphia and would have put down its own rails all the way to Jersey City had it not been for a most tragic incident--which has no place in this book. It is enough here to say that eventually it obtained trackage rights from Philadelphia to Jersey City over a combination of certain lines of the Reading and the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Recently, as we have seen, these were so extended as to bring it into the Pennsylvania Station. Railroad competition to-day in a good many parts of the land is not a very serious thing--save, possibly, for publicity purposes.