Boston & Albany Railroad is established.

(Jan.) It takes over the Boston & Worcester and operates from the existing stations on Beach Street and Kneeland Street. The company takes over the Grand Junction Railroad in 1869, allowing better access to the Port of Boston. But as Charles Francis Adams Jr. later writes, “Chicago, in 1835 a mere outpost town on the shores of Lake Michigan, was transformed into the chief distributing point of an interior, in comparison with which that region which the foreign trade of Boston once supplied, was lost in insignificance.” The Boston & Albany is taken over by the New York Central Railroad in 1900, becomes part of the Penn Central Railroad in 1968, and Contrail in 1976.