Antique 1930s-1950s B&O Railroad Stock Certificate 🚂 10 Shares Blue Vignette For Sale

Size: 11 1/2\" x 7 1/4\"

Original B&O common stock certificate for ten shares, printed in blue with the engraved \"Old Tom Thumb Train\" vignette. The railroad from the Monopoly board, on real paper.

• Issuer: The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, \"Incorporated by the State of Maryland, February 28, 1827\"
• Type: Common stock certificate
• Shares: Ten (10), par value $100 each, \"SHARES $100 EACH\" on the bottom ribbon
• Issued: 1930s-1950s; the typed dates differ certificate to certificate
• Printer: International Bank Note Co., New York (imprint at the foot)
• Color: Blue border, grey engraved vignette
• Vignette: early upright-boilered locomotive pulling a barrel flatcar, a double-deck passenger coach and an open car past a bay with sailboats and an arched bridge
• Back: printed assignment and transfer form

An issued certificate with the edge wear, soft corner creasing and toning of its age. Expect financial writings, markings, stamps, hole punches and staple holes as part of the life of the instrument: pencil ledger notes, transfer-agent and registrar stamps, revenue and documentary tax stamps, the punch that retired it, staple holes from a transfer book. Those are the marks of a share that did its job, not damage. Seals belong on that list too: a corporate seal embossed straight into the paper, a wafer seal, and the signature-guarantee patch a bank or broker laid across an endorsement and then signed over the top of. The photographs show one certificate from a group: the typed owner, number, dates, stamps, signatures and back endorsements differ on each, and the one you receive carries its own. The design, blue color, vignette and ten-share denomination are the same.

The Monopoly railroad. The B&O is one of the four railroads on the Monopoly board, which takes its street names from Atlantic City, yet the real B&O never directly served Atlantic City. The game went into production in the mid-1930s, while certificates of this design were being issued.

Tom Thumb. In 1830 Peter Cooper ran a small coal-burning locomotive, its boiler flues made from musket barrels, to convince the young B&O to adopt steam; on August 28, 1830 it carried the directors to Ellicott\'s Mills. Legend says it raced a horse-drawn car on the way back and lost when its blower belt slipped off. The B&O Railroad Museum notes the race was never documented, and the railroad chose steam anyway.

Baltimore, Maryland, 1827. Chartered by Maryland on the date engraved on this certificate and promoted by Baltimore businessmen Philip E. Thomas and George Brown to reach the Ohio River, the B&O began building on July 4, 1828, when Charles Carroll of Carrollton, last living signer of the Declaration of Independence, laid the first stone. Its first section opened May 24, 1830, and it became the first in the United States built as a common carrier, hauling anyone\'s passengers and freight for hire.

The 1899 fine print. The text on the face refers to $60,000,000 of preferred stock under stockholder resolutions of April 11, 1899, paying non-cumulative dividends of up to four per cent ahead of the common stock. That is the capital structure the B&O took on when it came out of its 1896 receivership, brought on by the Panic of 1893.

Uncle Dan\'s Depression. Under president Daniel Willard (1910-1941) the B&O ran the Columbian, the first fully air-conditioned passenger train, in 1931. The Depression hit the railroad hard: the Reconstruction Finance Corporation lent it $8 million in 1932 to repay Kuhn, Loeb and Company, and a $900,000 Public Works Administration loan in 1934 funded the streamlined Royal Blue. The B&O accepted merger overtures from the Chesapeake and Ohio in 1962, joined the Chessie System in 1973, and is part of CSX today.

• Railroad and B&O collectors
• Stock and bond (scripophily) collections
• Monopoly fans and game rooms
• Office, study or bank framing
• Gifts for finance and history lovers