gh standards and progressive practice. It
was the pioneer in most of the improvements which were later adopted
by other roads. The Pennsylvania was the first American railroad to lay
steel rails and the first to lay Bessemer rails; it was the first to put
the steel fire-box under the locomotive boiler; it was the first to use
the air brake and the block signal system; it was the first to use in
its shops the overhead crane.

In these earlier years also the Pennsylvania had established its
enviable record for conservative and non-speculative management. No
railroad wrecker or stock speculator had ever had anything to do with
the financial control of the company, and this tradition has been passed
on from decade to decade. The stockholders themselves, even in those
days of loose methods and careless finance, had the dominating voice
in the affairs of the company and were also factors in the approval or
disapproval of any proposed policies. In the matter of its finances
the Pennsylvania developed and established an equally clean record. The
company began almost at the beginning to pay a satisfactory dividend on
its shares and continued to do so right through the Civil War period.
Since the through line from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh was opened, not
a single year has passed without the payment of a dividend--a sixty-year
record which can be duplicated by no other American railroad system.

The Pennsylvania still continued to forge ahead even during the exciting
period from 1877 to about 1889, when the trunk lines were aggressively
carrying on that policy of cutthroat competition between Chicago and the
Atlantic seaboard which resulted in so severely weakening the credit
and position of properties like the Baltimore and Ohio and the Erie.
The Pennsylvania, too, indulged in rate cutting, but the management was
equal to the situation and made up in other directions what it lost in
lower rates. It gave superior service, developed a high efficiency of
operation, and steadily maintained its properties at a high standard.
During these years the president was George B. Roberts, who had
succeeded Thomas A. Scott in 1880.

Roberts's management spanned the period from 1880 to 1897 and embraced a
decade of comparative prosperity for the country as a whole and nearly
a decade of panic and industrial and financial depression. During
the earlier decade the business of the Pennsylvania was continually
benefited by the industrial develop