(The Baltimore Sun published the following article by Reginald Fields on June 14.)
BALTIMORE — It will take more than $20 million and at least six years before the B&O Railroad Museum fully recovers from February’s roundhouse roof collapse, but the museum still expects to reopen – minus a few exhibits – sometime next year.
“We have made all the decisions on how to bring the building back,” Francis X. Smyth, chief executive of Century Engineering and a B&O board member, said yesterday. “So we know how it is going to look when you walk through the doors, just not when yet.”
The West Baltimore museum has also decided to build a new restoration shop and use its staff to fix damaged railcars and locomotives. The shop will double as an unusual exhibit for the museum, one where visitors will get a rare look at rail vehicles being taken apart and restored.
The rebuilt roundhouse, the museum’s centerpiece attraction, will look nearly identical to the original 1884 version, with only a few variations to meet modern specifications and codes. The biggest difference will be welded steel trusses instead of riveted wrought iron.
But to maintain the building’s original look, fake plates and rivets will be used to simulate the former trusses. The painted walls and floor will be the same color, and the damaged wooden turntable, powered by an antiquated 19th-century motor to move the railcars inside the museum, will be restored.
“Some people might say, ‘Why would you spend the money for fake plates and rivets?'” said B&O executive director Courtney B. Wilson. “This building is a national landmark, so it was important to bring it back to its original state.”
Officials considered making some significant changes to the building, such as adding air conditioning and insulating the roof, but worried that those items might compromise the integrity of the museum.
Wilson said the roof collapse on Feb. 17 might have been the worst incident to ever befall a historical museum in the United States. Restoring the 119-year-old roundhouse is both structurally and financially challenging.
Museum officials have found only two suppliers – one in West Virginia and the other in Canada – that can handle a slate order to cover 30,000 square feet of roof. And only a handful of companies are capable of replicating trusses as intricately detailed as the B&O wants.
In March, a B&O official said the roof could be complete by late December. Because there have been so many rainy days lately, that date has been pushed back to late January. After that, it will take several more months to fix the roundtable, install new windows and update the electrical and heating systems.
“We just don’t know yet” when the museum will reopen, Wilson said. “It’ll be a little while even after the roof is done.”
And that could raise budgeting problems. The museum had insurance to cover one year of operating costs, such as paying salaries and utility bills. Because of that, Wilson has not had to lay off any of his 50 employees.
Another insurance policy covered for one year the cost of incidentals, such as paying for extra security, overtime and snow removal.
“These were policies to help keep you stable in the event something like this happened,” said Stefanie Fay, the B&O’s director of development. “But that money all stops on Feb. 16, 2004.”
And no one anticipates the museum’s reopening before then.
In addition to losing visitor ticket sales, the museum can’t book the roundhouse for parties, wedding receptions and corporate affairs – lucrative business for the B&O – until a reopening date is set.
Bad timing
The roof fell on Feb. 17 during a record snowfall and damaged 20 rail vehicles and destroyed two others, along with hundreds of smaller rail yard artifacts and trinkets. The collapse could not have come at a more inopportune time in the museum’s long history.
This summer, the B&O was set to celebrate its 50-year anniversary and play host to what was billed as the largest railroading fair in this country’s history, the Fair of the Iron Horse.
The fair was supposed to draw an international crowd of more than 350,000 people and showcase the B&O – nationally regarded for having one of the country’s best collection of 19th-century railcars and locomotives – and be a huge fund-raiser for the museum.
Instead, the B&O is about to launch a fund-raising campaign with a goal that might reach $10 million to pay for restoration of its damaged vehicles – a project that will take at least six years, said Frederic W. Yocum Jr., a retired train company executive and a B&O board member.
The museum carried $5 million of insurance for restoring collection pieces, but restoration experts and a group of curators from railroading museums in California, Pennsylvania and North Carolina estimated damage to be close to $15 million for the B&O’s rail vehicles.
B&O officials think they can do the job themselves for a little less and bring the total cost for the new shop and restoration closer to $10 million.
The bill for the roof – $10 million – is covered by insurance.
‘This is our reality’
Four months since the roof failure, all the debris – the twisted contortion of iron, wood and slate – has been cleared and the floor of the roundhouse swept clean.
The most damaged rail vehicles have been carefully removed, some by a crane that lifted them out through the gaping hole over the roundhouse.
Others are still inside, trapped because the turntable is inoperable and a crane can’t reach them. They are protected from the weather and reconstruction work by a makeshift cover of mesh, tarp and wood.
The remaining portion of the lower roof is reinforced by scaffolding. Workers are done shoring up the building, and masonry workers are fitting bricks to replace those missing from the walls.
It’s not the summer B&O officials envisioned.
“You know, by now, we would have been getting ready for our big fair,” Wilson said in an interview last week standing in the roundhouse under a clear sky. “But this is our reality.”