Baltimore Light Rail at Woodberry

Baltimore Light Rail at Woodberry

It is late afternoon on a mid-October day, and the trees in Baltimore’s
Jones Falls Valley are just now beginning to take on a bit of autumn’s colorful palette.

Here in the Woodberry section, where historic old mill buildings are being converted into residential and business space, a northbound Baltimore Light Rail train has just made a stop and is now about to cross Union Avenue.

This scenic stretch of Light Rail, following the rugged valley of Jones Falls, uses the former right of way of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s North Central Railway connecting Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station with York, Pennsylvania.
There, passenger trains bound for Pittsburgh and Chicago would join the high speed main line to Harrisburg to hook into the “main” section of such legendary PRR trains as The Broadway Limited on their way west from New York and Philadelphia.

While Baltimore Light Rail uses attractive modern railcars, standing along this line with the cameras on this autumn afternoon brought back childhood memories of genuinely thrilling railroad images as my Dad took me to several points along this line to wait in excited anticipation for the approaching roar of EMD E-8 diesels in PRR Tuscan Red and gold pin stripes with their matching passenger trains.

While the Pennsy also ran meandering local trains along this route, the “name” trains in and out of Baltimore passed through points such as this at a whooshing and roaring track speed, acknowledging their presence in advance with the “two longs, a short, and a long” blasts of their horns, leaving the always remembered scent of diesel in the air and the delicious sound of multiple notched-up “567” prime movers as they rapidly approached, thundered by, and disappeared through the sweeping S-curve (behind the photographer).

Photo + Design ©2015 Steve Ember