Charm Citizen

Trains and railroads are a part of life in South Baltimore. No matter where you are on the peninsula, you are never far from the tracks and the sound of the horns.

A railroad loop bound the Locust Point neighborhood at the far eastern part of the peninsula like a belt. The tracks served a few businesses there, mainly the sugar factory, but for the most part that tracks just served an overflow area to store freight trains until the timing was right for things to start moving again. In Baltimore, it was often joked that dealing with CSX Railroad was like dealing with God because they were slow to respond and were rarely helpful if the community or local government needed something from them, like cutting the grass next to their property or informing people before they start cutting down trees with heavy equipment next door. With that knowledge, John and I felt  our decision to purchase a property bordering the rail lines would keep the status quo of  what had basically been an empty parking lot for a decade or longer. We didn’t think much would change there for a very long time and, having already lived on the peninsula for 11 years at that point in time, had never witnessed anything unusual or shady along the tracks or adjacent to them. Our primary concern was the noise from the train but having lived only two or three blocks from the train on Randall Street, that fact did not cause much worry. 

When we first moved to Randall Street in our first purchased house on the peninsula, we were shocked at how loud the train horn sounded compared to life on Light Street where we rented right around the corner for a couple of years prior. By the time we settled in at Randall Street, we could barely hear the trains at all. On Randall Street, the train tracks were about three blocks away. You could sometimes look west and see the railcars pass by slowly. This familiarity with the trains made us feel comfortable with the proximity to the train tracks when we were looking for new houses in Locust Point. Trains were just part of the fabric of life in that part of the city. 

However, life in Locust Point is different than life in other parts of South Baltimore. While the train moved on the periphery of the residential neighborhoods near Randall Street, the tracks circled Locust Point like a noose.

At first, we would awaken at night with the sound of the trains rolling slowly along the tracks, grinding to a halt, or settling into their new position on the tracks. The sounds reminded me of the saying “things that go bump in the night”, as they say, because the darkness would envelope the trains and only their movements could be heard. While the tracks, several in all, were quite active, sometimes a particular train would sit there for several days before moving along again only to reappear several days later. Others would remain in one spot for a few minutes or a few hours before departing again. The loop behind our house seemed to serve as a storage yard above other uses, the trains didn’t seem to have anywhere in particular they needed to go or at least not in a hurry anyway. Sometimes at night I would put my daughter to bed and listen to the wild sound of a shrieking train rounding the bend towards our neighborhood. It reminded me of what the wind might sound like howling over an English moor. Or other times, a train would blow its horn steady and long to announce its arrival.

The rail cars that lined the tracks behind our house consisted of all sorts of different shapes and sizes, ages and colors. There were boxcars and flatbeds, rusted and weathered cars, and storage tanks that said ominous things on the side like sodium hydroxide solution and phosphoric acid. Others just said corn syrup. Some cars appeared abandoned by the rail company left to wander the tracks for years filled with dust and debris while others were placed in heavy rotation, constantly making their way up and down the tracks in productive use. One car  had a bunch of porthole-looking circles punched out of it and only had one side left to it.. It traveled down the tracks like a picture frame displaying the varied scenes behind it. Others looked like just the frame of a rail car.

The colors of the cars reminded me of a portable “rainbow row”. Some were rusty shades of brown and orange. My favorites were the colors of peach and pale blues, the matte oranges, and yellows. Graffiti artists painted their symbols and designs all over the cars. One car had a Halloween scene painted on the side that included bats and jack-O-lanterns illuminated by a full moon. Others had ghosts painted on the side. As the rail cars crept by, it was almost a behind the scenes look at the American economy rolling by. Cars said things like Build America, Chessie System, Golden West Service, Conrail, CSX, Cotton Belt, Big Blue, Simplott, and Family Line Systems.

Some cars were refrigerated and made an annoying humming noise when they would stall behind our house for a night or half a day. A green light on the outside of the rail car was also an indicator of the power being used to cool the square box. 

Often times, the trains would carry brand new tractor and farm equipment that would roll down the tracks by the dozens. 

Our daughter loved to watch “el tren”, as she had learned to say in Spanish from her grandmother, from the house outside the kitchen window several times a day. She would wave to the train and shout “Adios”. Sometimes the train would consist of the caboose or a few cars, other times the train can stretch a mile long. From some angles, the cars looked like elephants moving in a line with their bottoms swaying to and from.

Prior to moving to Locust Point, I knew very little about trains besides what I had recently learned watching Thomas the Train with Loren. Words like chuff and sounds like choo choo were the extent of my knowledge despite living only a couple of blocks from the CSX tracks on Randall Street. 

Men could be seen working on the railroad at various times in bright yellow safety jackets walking up and down the tracks manually hitching and unhitching the cars. At one train crossing, the workers would manually light flares to alert cars of a train crossing when a cars were about to leave the gated yard. Periodic maintenance of the tracks involved of men and equipment called “tie gangs”. They would travel up and down the tracks replacing the wooden beams and gravel that ran along the inside of the tracks. 

The trains became a daily obsession for me at the new house. It seemed like every time I looked out the window, the scene had changed in some way. 

It was like the train network formed some sort of circulatory system for the neighborhood and the lifeblood of industry for the City, state and regional economy. 

Perhaps another day I will write about the ship and even the little short lines that served the port, which were rail lines only used in very rare instances to move cargo away from the ships.