Recently Lance Mindheim visited Kelly Regan’s Georgetown Branch layout and did a very nice writeup on the project! I highly recommend you visit Lance’s blog and have a look. Bravo, Kelly!
B&O (Chessie) GP9 6662 Southbound in Bethesda, 1982
Recently snagged this slide on eBay. I haven’t had a chance to scan it, so this eBay thumbnail will have to do. Photo taken April 1, 1982
B&O 6662, a GP9 built by EMD as C&O 6113 in September, 1956. Not much left of the yard at this point, the writing was on the wall.
Georgetown Branch Clinic on YouTube
Back in September I gave a clinic at the Mid Atlantic Railway Prototype Modeler meet on the Georgetown Branch project. It was a blast! Last week I gave the presentation for the Operations Special Interest Group (OpSIG) and thankfully it has been recorded and posted to YouTube for all to enjoy.
Many thanks to the OpSIG team for having me!
Creeping Through Bethesda, April 19, 1982
The local is slowly crossing Bethesda Ave on a sunny April day as it makes its way West toward Georgetown. Today’s turn has a single boxcar and caboose. The same loco is seen in another photo from four days later, previously posted to the blog! Note the “Radio …” text written within the blue of the Chessie logo on the nose. “Radio Equipped” graffiti, perhaps?
Checking In
It’s been three months since my last post and a lot has been going on. Between sending my kids off to college, presenting a clinic on the Georgetown Branch at the Mid Atlantic Railway Prototype Modelers meet, a trip to Portugal to watch my daughter compete in the Acrobatic Gymnastics World Championship, prepping for and attending the Great Scale Model Train Show for the weekend as a vendor with my model RR club, presenting a clinic on upgrading Proto2000 GP7/GP9’s for the Potomac Division of the Mid East Region, NMRA, Parents weekend at aforementioned kids’ schools (JMU/Quinnipiac), traveling to New England to visit family for a long weekend, attending a Slowdive concert in Philadelphia and a Brothertiger show in DC, layout ops and open houses and much more…
So, yeah, it’s been hectic. The Georgetown Branch project has taken a back seat this Fall to “life” but fear not, it’s still very much active and moving forward in different ways. I have been talking to Kelly a lot lately as he pushes through with his designs of the Whipple Truss bridge across the C&O Canal. He’s been working on this for the last couple years and recently revamped his approach, integrating steel beams for support due to the wide span. Testing of the fine 3D printed parts continues with promising results. I think he’s close to a final design and will be producing test prints soon. It’s exciting times.
Follow along on Kelly’s Blog.
Regarding the MARPM Georgetown Branch presentation, which hopefully some of you witnessed. Fear not. While that clinic was not recorded, I will be presenting it online for the OpSIG group Virtual Meetup on December 8th, at 7:00pm. It will hopefully be recorded and posted to their YouTube channel afterward for public viewing.
1970 National Christmas Tree in Georgetown
I stumbled on this image on eBay and had to snag it. Yes, I know it’s not great with “A-OK” Paddy taking up most of the frame, but these things are hard to come by so I’ll take what I can get. 🙂 Anyway, this depicts one of the most cursed shipments I’ve ever heard of on the Georgetown Branch.
Since 1954 the National Christmas Tree was shipped via rail from destinations far and wide across America, often arriving in Georgetown to be transloaded by crane to a flatbed truck, driven across DC to the Mall, and erected in front of the White House for the Pageant of Peace. In 1970, a 78′ spruce in Nemo, South Dakota was selected. The tree was felled on Nov 10th and loaded onto a truck for the 22 mile journey to Rapid City, SD. There it was loaded onto Chicago North Western 132577, a 70-ton 65’6″ gondola, to begin its journey to the Nation’s Capital on Nov 16th.
Unfortunately the train derailed twice along the way. The first was two days after departing Rapid City near the town of Beemer, NE on Wed Nov 18th when the train took a siding and derailed.
The ill-fated train would derail again, this time outside of Pittsburg, PA. It arrived a bit early to DC and had to layover from November 24 to 27 on the US Army Map Agency siding, adjacent to the south entrance of Dalecarlia Tunnel. The train would continue on to Georgetown on November 28, where it would arrive in the yard to be transloaded onto a flatbed truck and head to its final destination, the National Mall, where it would be the centerpiece of the Pageant of Peace.
Switching the Georgetown Branch in 1995?!
You read that right! Friend Matt Robertson shared two photos he shot himself back in October 1995 of local D782 (out of Jessup, MD by this time) working the Mason-Dixon Recycling plant, which of course used to be E.C. Keys; one of the oldest industries on the GB.
Matt writes: “Local is the D782 which operated out of Jessup on weekday afternoons. They worked industries on the Capital Sub and Metropolitan Sub as far west as Derwood in this era. Honestly I don’t know where the tank car came from. They are working the only place left on the GT branch by this time. I believe it loaded scrap paper and the two Railbox cars will be placed. I think maybe they pulled some cars out too but unfortunately these pics are the only two I took.”
Going back through my notes, to add some context to the Junction in the later years, I found a reference from the old Yahoo! Group where Christopher Parker wrote: “I first saw Georgetown Junction in 1981 and the coal trestle hadn’t been there for some time. It was an empty gravel lot, with only a concrete abutment and the bit of track that rested on solid ground. No switch. At that time the Mason-Dixon Recycling siding was gone too. It was Silver Spring Recycling then, and I remember seeing lots of Garden State Paper trucks up there. Sometime between 1982 and 1984 (?) the siding was relayed. The USGS topo map from 1971 shows the coal trestle, but that’s not terribly reliable.”
New Talbot Ave Bridge is Open
The new Talbot Ave bridge across the Metropolitan Branch at Georgetown Jct has officially opened.
https://x.com/MCDOTNow/status/1795569974876270652
Interesting Wilkins Rogers 1958 “OBJECTIONAL ODORS” sign
The Hopfenmaier rendering plant was a fixture on the Georgetown waterfront, producing constant odors of putrescence from 1873 to its demise in 1971. The Wilkins Rogers milling co across the street produced baking goods, receiving grains via rail and shipping out their mixes to local grocery stores and distributors via truck. In the 1950s and 1960s, as more and more of Georgetown became residential, folks were really starting to take notice of the incredible odors that permeated. Even when the plant wasn’t operating, on very hot days the caked-on slime and sludge from the plant would permeate the air along the waterfront. At some point around 1958, in protest, the Wilkins Rogers company had this sign created and mounted prominently on their mill where passing motorists on the Whitehurst Freeway could view it.
It read “THE OBJECTIONAL ODORS YOU MAY NOTICE IN THIS AREA, DO NOT ORIGINATE IN THIS PLANT. W.R.MLG. CO.”
In the late 1960s the government even used a sort of “smell-o-meter” to try to detect dangerous levels of chemicals. This failed, but eventually the Government “won” by buying out the Hopfenmaier company and razing it ca 1971.
Additional reading:
Two Special Photos – Dalecarlia and Rock Creek Trestle, 1949
Earlier this week my model railroad club visited the historic B&O station in downtown Silver Spring, MD to assist in reassembling the model railroad there in the baggage room. The layout had recently been moved due to some HVAC work above. While there, the host gave me a tour of the building. As I entered the station master’s office, and was glancing around, a poster board with photos caught my eye. On it were a collection of images from the long time Silver Spring station agent, Robert Davis, taken in the late 1940s mostly depicting the railroad in the area; wrecks, maintenance work, etc. But there were two photos that jumped off the poster for me. First is this image of the Rock Creek Trestle:
The reason this image is so special to me, is it is perhaps the best image I’ve seen that shows the trestle as it stood from the mid 1940’s until the Hurricane Agnes flood of 1972 when the west side of the trestle collapsed, forever changing the bridge. The trestle was demolished in 2019 to make way for the Purple Line. We are looking north in the photo, trains to Georgetown would be heading to the left.
This image shows the south portal of the Dalecarlia Tunnel. For context, just eight months earlier the B&O ran an excursion for the MSME, taking Q-1c 4320 out for a grand trip to Georgetown and back.
It was a delight to stumble upon these two photos. I am always looking for images to fill in the gaps of understanding and context as I do my research and these are two that I’d never before seen. I am hoping that there are more!