Why would we want Wicomico? (Whew!)

After Announcing this blog to a number of my friends, the first thing I heard back was, “Where’s the track plan?” Well, here it is. Sort of. In a minute. But first I think you need to know why I chose this spot.
Wicomico Street is located in Baltimore, MD, on the west side of the Inner Harbor. These days, it's a stone's throw from Oriole Park at Camden Yards and M&T Stadium where the Baltimore Ravens play. Today, it's still a fairly busy industrial area with this mysterious, unused railroad track embedded in the middle of the road. In 1984, though, it was still an active switching area for the B&O (operating under the auspices of the Chessie System).

There's a bit of a chicken and egg thing going on here. I'm fuzzy about whether I stumbled upon the B-More Ghosts "Street Trackage Survivors" page first and that piqued my interest, or if I saw Pentrex' Street Running video first and then went looking for suitable B&O candidates, stumbling across Wicomico in the process. In any case, I was hooked on the concept and I decided very quickly that street running was something I wanted to do on my layout.

The B-More Ghosts site showed only two pictures of Wicomico St. This one and this one. It wasn’t much to go on, but enough to get me excited. But thankfully, there's Google Maps (and now Bing bird's-eye view). From there I could make out that there was still lots of track left in the street. For example, as you can see in Figure 1, which shows Ellicott Engineering, there is still a ton of track in the asphalt, even to this day. (You can see this view yourself here.) It made it very easy to figure out the layout and that this was once a pretty active area.

Figure 1: The arrows clearly show still-extant track embedded in the
pavement coming off of Wicomico St. into Ellicott Engineering. (Click image to enlarge.)

Street running? Check.

Figure 2: Wicomico Street map from
Baltimore Division Roadway Maps II.
(Click image to enlarge.)

I pored over the Google aerial photos for a long time. And that was great. But while I thought it was a neat area, I still had no idea what any of the industries were and what they might possibly ship and receive. Then the B&O Historical Society came to the rescue. I purchased from them a book called Baltimore Division Roadway Maps II (B&O H.S. Item number 71002 for anyone who is interested). I can't tell you how invaluable this book has been. As you can see in Figure 2, it shows the industry names, their layout (as of the late 80s) and in some cases how many spots they had for loads. This went a long way towards getting a workable plan on paper.


So I liked its operating potential. Another thing I liked about it was that it was compact, and therefore buildable; a good starter project. A bonus is that it happens to be right in the middle of a lot of railroading in the city, so when it comes time to expand, there are many options.

And there was one other thing about it I liked: saying Wicomico. It’s fun. Wicomico. Wicomico. Wicomico. Try it.

So now we get to the plan (“Finally!” I can hear some of you saying). As mentioned in the Givens and Druthers, I wanted to model the area as a Layout Design Element, to steal a term from Tony Koester. In essence a selectively compressed version of the real thing, with the benefit being that you can be assured it will operate correctly because the prototype operated it. I realized that it laid out very nicely into five 2x4 tables, with each table being a block. I added back some trackage that’s visible in the aerial (and in person) but no longer shown as active in the roadway map. Here is what I ended up with. And it was good.

Compare it to the map. I think I covered the bases. This plan would allow me to add staging at the left end (which is where the track connected to the main), and have a decent operating run. 
But like God with Adam before Eve, I couldn’t leave well enough alone, as we’ll discuss later.