(The following article by Edward Gunts was posted on the Baltimore Sun website on November 12.)
BALTIMORE, Md. — After the roof crashed in on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum during a monster snowstorm last year, executive director Courtney Wilson never suspected he might find good fortune amid the rubble.
Little could he have known that the venerable museum, struggling for money and attendance in recent years, was about to receive an outpouring of support that would lead to its salvation.
As one of the first to arrive on the scene, Wilson was too devastated by what he saw to think that far ahead. “It was such a tragedy,” Wilson recalls. “There were moments when consideration was given to whether the museum would reopen or not.”
Yet tomorrow, the roundhouse will reopen to the public, as good as new. It’s the first step in a $30 million, multiyear effort not only to reconstruct the roof but to create an even better setting to celebrate the birthplace of American railroading.
“This has really turned from a tragedy to a triumph for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum,” Wilson says.
But no one would have guessed that it would turn out this way.
As snow blanketed the region on February 16 and 17, 2003, the museum was already under stress. The surrounding area was in decline. A master plan to revamp the 40-acre site at Pratt and Poppleton streets was shelved because of lack of funds. The 50-year-old museum was competing with newer, glitzier harborfront attractions.
Then the roof fell in. A 28 inches of snow caused half of the roundhouse’s lower roof to buckle and collapse, dropping tons of debris on prized locomotives and rail cars below. It might have forced the museum to close forever. Instead, the storm turned out to be a boon, Wilson says, because news of the catastrophe was broadcast as far away as Japan and Australia. Within days, train and history buffs from around the world began sending money and other expressions of support.
First-graders from Howard County took up a collection at shopping centers and raised $2,000. An anonymous Florida donor sent $210,000. The museum’s Web site was suddenly receiving more than 1 million visitors a month.
The museum’s board of directors seized the moment, vowing not only to rebuild the roundhouse and repair the damaged cars but to carry out numerous long-deferred goals.
The museum’s insurer agreed to pay about two-thirds of the estimated $30 million cost of repairs, Wilson says. Thanks largely to the widespread publicity, the museum received donations of $6.5 million – and is working to raise the rest.
Working with SMG Architects, Century Engineering and the Whiting Turner Contracting Co., the museum restored the 45,000-square-foot roundhouse to its original appearance, while strengthening structural systems. The refurbished museum features a new entrance, four exhibit galleries and an expanded gift shop. Elsewhere on the grounds are new attractions, with more due by spring.
In practically every way, the museum has reinvented itself to be more meaningful and accessible to the thousands who come through its doors every year. Barriers to the disabled have been removed. Even the labels on the exhibits have been rewritten so they’re no longer geared solely to railroad buffs. There’s now more emphasis on the people behind the railroad – and its impact on their lives.
The storm gave directors an “incredible opportunity” to rethink the way the museum tells the story of Baltimore’s role in railroading, Wilson says.
“When you have something that large and catastrophic happen, it forces you to examine your core values,” he says. As a result, “I feel like the museum is new. It might look the same from the outside. But the visitor’s experience is going to be totally different.”
Historic site
The B&O Railroad was chartered in 1827 in a pioneering effort to link Baltimore with the Ohio River 300 miles away. The railroad’s Mount Clare Shops property at Pratt and Poppleton streets contains the first stone laid for the railroad and the first 1.3 miles of track ever used for long-distance commercial rail travel in America.
In 1953, the railroad created the B&O Transportation Museum, and made the roundhouse its home. It was renamed the B&O Railroad Museum in 1976 and renovated in time for the nation’s bicentennial. In the early 1990s, CSX Corp., which had absorbed the B&O Railroad, formed a private, nonprofit entity to run the museum and deeded 25 acres to it. In 1999, the museum became a full affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution.
The reopening coincides with the start of the season that typically brings the museum its biggest crowds, the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. That’s when the museum mounts its Holiday Festival of Trains, featuring scale models and toy trains. This year’s festival begins Nov. 26 and runs through Jan. 2, with exhibits changing weekly.
On Saturday, though, the focus of attention will be the roundhouse, restored at a cost of $15 million. Designed by noted architect E. Francis Baldwin, it’s actually a 22-sided polygon, officially called the Mount Clare Passenger Car Shop. Originally built for $100,472, it was an engineering marvel, the largest circular industrial building in the world at that time.
Soaring 135 feet, with a diameter of 235 feet, it has 22 bays to store rolling stock. At its center is a 60-foot-wide turntable that enables workers to move cars in and out with the touch of a gear, rotating them as if they were on a lazy Susan.
The President’s Day storm caused 11 of the roundhouse’s 22 lower roof sections to buckle and collapse. In the end, museum directors replaced the entire lower roof. The smaller upper roof remained intact, but directors opted to replace it as well.
Reconstruction
The reconstruction effort was overseen by a group that included Wilson and Ed Williams, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator, as well as representatives from SMG, Century and Whiting Turner. Their goal has been to save as much as possible of the buildings and collection, which have been designated historic landmarks by the National Park Service.
From the outside, the roundhouse has the same distinctive profile it always did – a two-tier, slate roof visible from much of downtown, with a cupola and lightning rod crowning the top.
Baldwin had studied bridge technology to design an elaborate network of cables and trusses to support the roof, so it would last for the ages. The reconstruction team decided to replicate the roof and its trusses but used contemporary materials in certain places to meet present-day building codes.
Some of the “forest cut” lumber was replaced by laminated wood. Wrought iron trusses were replaced with steel ones. The proportions of the metal trusses are slightly bulkier than before, and the load-bearing points were relocated as part of a subtle redesign. But people standing on the main floor, looking up at the ceiling, will have difficulty seeing the difference.
The rebuilding team considered making more changes to modernize the roundhouse, such as adding roof insulation and air conditioning, but ultimately decided against it, according to architect Walter Schamu of SMG.
For the most part, “we just ended up putting the building back the way Baldwin had drawn it,” he said. “It’s extraordinary.”
The interior has been taken back to its original color scheme – whitewashed walls with a black base, and an unpainted wood ceiling with metal supports painted “B&O red.” Two sets of large train doors, crafted to match those designed by Baldwin, have been installed to replace metal roll-up doors that the railroad later put in. As a result, the roundhouse looks more like it did in 1884 than in early 2003 – although the unpainted ceiling gives it the feeling of a new building.
Because the turntable was damaged, the museum staff could not immediately remove the rail cars for repairs. As a result, the cars were left in place while the roof was reproduced above them – a job that required a spider’s web of cabling. Visitors this month will see the rail cars behind glass partitions in their damaged state, awaiting later phases of the restoration effort.
To protect the cars during the roof reconstruction, contractors erected “the largest human jungle gym I had ever seen,” Schamu said. The clean-up process was “a remarkable picking away at the pieces, just to get back to the bones of the building.”
According to Wilson, only one piece of equipment was damaged beyond repair – an 1867 passenger car that was reduced to splinters. Fortunately, he says, the museum has a twin, currently in unrestored condition, that can eventually be displayed in its place. All the others can be saved, he says. “We’re lucky this wasn’t the Faberge egg collection.
“This tragedy has really brought to light how significant this historic site is and how significant this collection is to the rest of the world,” Wilson says. “It’s a piece of our heritage that we couldn’t afford not to rebuild.”