all of which built into the Ohio Valley/Midwest in the 1840s-50s. Manager and financier By the late 1840s Robinson was moving away from civil engineering, and toward management and finance. After successfully raising funds in England for the Reading railroad in the 1830s, he more and more turned to financing and directing project. Robinson became an active stockholder and/or director of various rail and water transport companies—the Seaboard & Roanoke Railroad, the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, Chester Valley Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad, Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad, steamboats on the Chesapeake, and other properties—managing his holdings from his Philadelphia home. During the American Civil War, his son John Moncure Robinson was president of the Seaboard and Roanoke Railroad and took pride in substituting Southern products for supplies normally purchased in the North (such as bacon grease for whale oil, and even manufacturing its own soap). However, military needs led the Confederate Secretary of War to order key railroad supplies such as iron to be sent to other locations, and even ordered the destruction of both Norfolk & Petersburg and Seaboard & Roanoke railroad track to patch other lines, especially the line from Petersburg to Weldon, North Carolina (previously a competitor). Federal troops seized one locomotive, and other rolling stock leased to other railroads. In May 1863 Union troops captured a bridge near Carrsville, Virginia and sent salvaged track to Norfolk, as well as narrowed the (5 foot wide) S&R line between Suffolk and Kilbey, so it could be operated as part of the U.S. Military Railroad. Meanwhile, following the example of his cousins (Conway Robinson's sons), Moncure Robinson's son John M. Robinson accepted a commission as a Confederate captain and in 1863 served as an engineering officer under General Sam Jones in southwestern Virginia. He also ran the Union blockade and became a special purchasing agent in Europe for five Virginia railroads and the Confederate government. As commander of Company B of the 38th North Carolina Infantry, J.M. Robinson would attend General Robert E. Lee during the surrender at Appomattox Court House. He would later become President of the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad, but resigned in a bitter dispute with his father over curtailment of steamboat service on the Potomac River (although the two would reconcile at the end of both their lives). Captain Robinson would become president of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company (a/k/a Bay Line) as well as