Reading Company. Office of Secretary-Treasurer.

The Wilmington and Northern Railroad Company was a branch of the Reading railroad system running in a north-south direction between Wilmington, Del., and Reading, Pa. It began life on March 5, 1861, as the Wilmington and Brandywine Railroad Company, under which name it only managed to conduct preliminary surveys. Its object was to connect the various industrial plants located along Brandywine Creek with other railroads leading to the west and to the anthracite coal regions. The Wilmington and Brandywine was renamed the Delaware and Pennsylvania State Line Railroad Company on February 5, 1865, and merged with the Berks and Chester Railroad Company of Pennsylvania on May 29, 1866, to form the Wilmington and Reading Railroad Company. It completed its line from Wilmington to Birdsboro, Pa., in 1870. The road was controlled by the owners of lineside industries, most notably the du Ponts, and the iron-making families of Huston, Steele, Pennock, and Brooke.

The Wilmington and Reading Railroad Company was not financially successful, and defaulted on its interest payments in 1875. At the same time the company became involved with another group of promoters with a paper charter for the Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York Railroad Company. This company had originally been called the State Line and Juniata Railroad and was authorized to build from the Maryland state line to the Broad Top Coal Field, about 150 miles west of the Wilmington and Reading. However, a charter supplement granted unlimited branching powers within the state of Pennsylvania, and its owners sought to promote it first as a line between the Broad Top Field and New York, and then, by absorbing the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Company of 1872, as a line between Baltimore and New York. By merging with the W & R on June 1, 1875, the BNY & P acquired charter rights in Delaware.

...