Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum

The story

The National Museum of Railroad History & Innovation (formerly and still referred to by locals as the B&O Railroad Museum) is a museum and historic railway station exhibiting historic railroad equipment in Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) company originally opened the museum on July 4, 1953, with the name of the Baltimore & Ohio Transportation Museum. It has been called one of the most significant collections of railroad treasures in the world and has the largest collection of 19th-century locomotives in the U.S. The museum is located in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's old Mount Clare Station and adjacent roundhouse, and retains 40 acres of the B&O's sprawling Mount Clare Shops site, which is where, in 1829, the B&O began America's first railroad and is the oldest railroad manufacturing complex in the United States. Mount Clare is considered to be a birthplace of American railroading, as the site of the first regular railroad passenger service in the U.S., beginning on May 22, 1830. It was also to this site that the first telegraph message, "What hath God wrought?" was sent on May 24, 1844, from Washington, D.C., using Samuel Morse's electric telegraph. The museum houses collections of 19th- and 20th-century artifacts related to America's railroads. The collection includes 250 pieces of railroad rolling stock, 15,000 artifacts, 5,000 cubic feet (140 m3) of archival material, four significant 19th-century buildings, including the historic roundhouse, and a mile of track, considered the most historic mile of railroad track in the United States. Train rides are offered on the mile of track on Wednesday through Sunday from April through December and on weekends in January. In 2002, the museum had 160,000 visitors annually. The museum also features an outdoor G-scale layout, two indoor HO scale model, and a wooden model train for children to climb on. From Thanksgiving through the New Year, local model railroad groups set up large layouts on the roundhouse floor and in select locations on the grounds of the museum. A museum store offers toys, books, DVDs, and other railroad-related items. The museum and station were designated as a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1961. In 2008, the museum won three awards in Nickelodeon's Parents' Picks Awards in the categories of Best Museum for Little Kids, Best Indoor Playspace for Little Kids, and Best Indoor Playspace for Big Kids. Television and film actor Michael Gross is the museum's "celebrity spokesman". The museum definitively documented 24 Freedom Seekers that used the B&O Railroad on their journeys on the Underground Railroad – 8 of which traveled through the museum's historic site of Mount Clare. In 2021, the museum's Mount Clare Station building was designated as a National Park Service Underground Railroad Network to Freedom site. The museum also hosts an annual Day Out with Thomas event every year, complete with the train's excursion including a non-powered Thomas the Tank Engine replica.

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Dates from 1884.

Wikidata Q805753, referenced by the OpenStreetMap record.

What the record says

Elevation

20 m

What to expect

Official site

How to reach it

Named places within 25 miles

Summits around it

The highest named summits within 25 miles of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum. Elevation from each summit’s own record; bearing measured between the two coordinates.

When to go

Light through the year

Local time (America/New_York).

Climate normals

Months averaging 50–80 °F: Apr–Jun, Aug–Nov.

1991–2020 U.S. Climate Normals, NOAA NCEI — Maryland SCI CTR, 1 mi away.

Where this comes from

OpenStreetMap element way/322870129