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B&O Railroad Museum

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B&O Mount Clare Station (Baltimore)
B&O Mount Clare Station (Baltimore)

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 Mt 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.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article B&O Railroad Museum (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

B&O Railroad Museum
West Pratt Street, Baltimore Sowebo

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Wikipedia: B&O Railroad MuseumContinue reading on Wikipedia

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N 39.285394444444 ° E -76.632397222222 °
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Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum - Roundhouse

West Pratt Street 901
21223 Baltimore, Sowebo
Maryland, United States
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B&O Mount Clare Station (Baltimore)
B&O Mount Clare Station (Baltimore)
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Pigtown, Baltimore
Pigtown, Baltimore

"Pigtown", also known as "Washington Village" is a neighborhood in the southwest area of Baltimore, bordered by Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to the east, Monroe Street to the west, Russell Street to the south, and West Pratt Street to the north. The neighborhood acquired its name during the second half of the 19th century, when the area was the site of butcher shops and meat packing plants to process pigs transported from the Midwest on the B&O Railroad; they were herded across Ostend and Cross Streets to be slaughtered and processed.Pigtown's annual festival famously features a pig race, called "The Squeakness", to commemorate its history.Pigtown has long been considered one of Baltimore's most promising neighborhoods due to its proximity to the I-95 corridor, the University of Maryland Medical Center, Camden Yards, Ravens Stadium, the Inner Harbor, and Downtown Baltimore. New developments on the eastern edge of the neighborhood of luxury townhomes were stalled after the 2008 market crash but eventually resumed and have continued into 2016. Other parts of the neighborhood contain classic Baltimore-style rowhouses, often with 1950s-era formstone facades on brick fronts. Pigtown has a relatively diverse population, which, besides its longtime residents, includes a sizeable graduate student population. Because of its proximity to Interstate 95, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, MARC's Camden Station, and its low housing costs, Pigtown also has a great number of commuters to Washington, D.C., and Fort George G. Meade. The legendary baseball player Babe Ruth was born and raised in Pigtown.