Progress report on new efforts to preserve the Maryland & Pennsylvania stone roundhouse in Baltimore, Md.:
This winter will no doubt be the last that finds the stalls of the old Ma & Pa Baltimore roundhouse full of roadway salt. Efforts are under way to remove the city's salt storage function of the roundhouse to a more environmentally friendly and accessible location. In the process, the roundhouse will eventually be turned over to the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, which operates its trackage past the location. Such a transition will no doubt forever commit the BSM to the Jones Falls Valley and end years of discussion of relocating the operation to a more tourist-friendly and less flood-prone location.
The BSM officials are careful not to "count chickens before they hatch", but at this point are willing to say that the eventual transfer of the roundhouse to the BSM is a done deal as soon as the city confirms an alternate salt-storage location (this is the bureaucracy holding up the mission). It is presumed that official transfer will occur by 2005; in the meantime the BSM has been proceeding with architects and planners to decide the best way to use the property and to seek grant monies for the expenses.
The biggest plus to the property is that, with a little landscaping, the floor of the roundhouse will sit above the flood levels that have jeopardized the current carbarn to the southeast. There will also be more parking available (the current streetside parking is targeted for eventual inclusion in a Jones Falls Trail, now almost completed and currently "shoo-flied" around the BSM visitors center area), as well as space to store the many buses now owned by the BSM and stored elsewhere. Although no formal Ma & Pa exhibition has yet been planned, there are many BSM members that are also members of one or both Ma & Pa historical groups, and there is no doubt that some Ma & Pa representation will occur. Also being discussed is a second library, to either replace or supplement the current Maryland Rail Heritage Library (both traction and rail) in the current visitors center, as well as possible banquet or restaurant space.
A decision about a replacement turntable has not, to my knowledge, been made. Any pro-turntable sentiment will have to deal with the streetcar historians who can recount horror stories of trolley "roundhouses" full of cars perishing to the inability of the turntable to evacuate cars during a blaze. Fire protection, of course, should make this a moot point; however, multiple diamonds leading to several stalls may be an equally unfeasible plan. Whatever the end result of the track planners, it should be most intriguing.
LNER4472-NOSPAM-@bcpl.net