(The North County News published the following story by Bob Allen on its website on October 9.)
MUDDY CREEK FORKS, PA. _ During its heyday in the first half of the 20th century, the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad ran a meandering, 77-mile route from Baltimore to York, Pa., that included 27 station stops at Towson, Glenarm, Long Green, and other Baltimore County, Harford County and southern Pennsylvania communities.
The “Ma & Pa” was created in 1901, with the merger of the Baltimore & Lehigh Railway and the York Southern, both of which had been consolidated from a number of smaller, short-line railroads.
Its tracks were laid out along a picturesque route between two cities that are only 47 miles apart as the crow flies.
“It had a more circuitous route than other, bigger lines, like the Western Maryland Railroad, or the Pennsylvania Railroad,” explained Craig Sansonetti, a railroad historian. “But it was the little towns in between that the Maryland & Pennsylvania was trying to serve.”
At its peak, the line had 16 locomotives and 160 rail cars. A crew of more than 100 workers was needed to maintain the track. The line also had 31 “flag stops,” where it halted on an as-needed basis.
The Ma & Pa, as it is still affectionately called, was not just a driving force in the local economy; it created a common thread that connected people’s lives and stitched together communities.
Charlie Mahan, 78, who grew up in Towson, vividly remembers going on “Railroad Fan Trips” the line offered back in the 1930s and ’40s.
“It cost a buck and a half to ride to York and back,” Mahan remembered. “I even took a farewell ride with a buddy of mine just before I left to go overseas in World War II. It was sort of my way of saying to the railroad, ‘See you when I get back again.’ ”
“For every major family event, whether it was a graduation or a wedding, our family had a picture taken on the Ma & Pa Railroad,” said Ericka Quesenbery, whose great-grandfather, great-grandmother, grandfather, father and other relatives worked on the railroad.
“We were all connected by what we did on the railroad,” added Quesenbery, who grew up in Fallston and now lives in southern Pennsylvania. “My grandfather used to always say that we didn’t have a bloodline, we had a railroad.”
On Sept. 27, Quesenbery shared family photographs and memories with other devotees of the Ma & Pa. The occasion was the annual Railroad Heritage Day, held at the Ma & Pa Railroad Heritage Village, in Muddy Creek Forks, Pa., a dozen or so miles southeast of York.
Muddy Creek Forks’ 1900 general store and train station, a rolling mill and even a short length of the line that once served the rural hamlet have been restored by people who, for one reason or another, have strong emotional ties to the line.
Mahan, who now lives in the Oak Crest Village retirement community, is a longtime member of both the nonprofit organizations behind Railroad Heritage Day and the restoration of Muddy Creek Falls: The Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Preservation Society (www.mapaps.org) and the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Historical Society (www.arroweb.com).
Every year, Mahan brings to Railroad Heritage Day a display of photographs that he either collected or took himself back in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Mahan never worked on the railroad and can’t quite explain the enduring fascination he’s had for it ever since he first rode it as a kid.
“I once sat down and figured out that altogether I made over 2,000 miles of trips” on the Ma & Pa, Mahan said. “And that was all on a 77-mile line,” he added.
Rails of milk and money
For quite a while in the early 1900s, more than 1,100 gallons of milk a day were hauled to Baltimore from the Fallston station alone.
Milk was such a staple cargo that the first train of the morning to make the hour-and-a-half run from Fallston to downtown Baltimore was called “The Milky Way.”
Within months of the Ma & Pa’s creation in 1901, factories, canneries, mills, warehouses, coal bins and other commercial enterprises began springing up all along the line, which took locomotives about four hours to traverse.
The line hauled countless tons of coal from Baltimore to smaller northward communities and countless tons of slate southward from slate mines around Cardiff, Md., and Delta, Pa.
It also carried thousands of passengers, including Baltimore-bound commuters and vacationing Baltimore residents bound for recreational areas such as The Rocks at Deer Creek, in Harford County.
A late, northbound train that left Baltimore at 11:40 p.m. let people from communities like Fallston, Hydes or Bel Air see a movie in Towson or a live show in Baltimore and still be back home by 1 or 1:30 in the morning.
The rail also hauled the U.S. mail in both directions until 1954, when both passenger service and mail deliveries were discontinued for the final time.
With the advent of the automobile and the freeway, the Ma & Pa, facing economic hard times, shut down its Maryland operations in 1958. The Pennsylvania portion of the line kept operating until the 1980s.
And though the railroad itself is gone, devotees like Seitz, Mahan, Don Jones (whose father worked for years as a trackman) and Larry Altoff, a former brakeman on the Ma & Pa, have kept its legacy alive with the hundreds of artifacts, photos, advertisements, signs, time tables, ledgers, lanterns, old newspaper articles and oral histories they’ve amassed.
Most are members of The Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Preservation Society (www.jarrettsville.org/mapa/history.htm), which was founded in 1986 and has since acquired five miles of the line’s track in Muddy Creek Valley. The society has also purchased and restored most of the buildings in the hamlet of Muddy Creek Forks, along with a small collection of railroad cars.
The Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Preservation Society will hold fall foliage tours Oct. 12-19. For details, call 410-734-4132 or visit the Web site: http://www.jarrettsville.org/mapa/index.htm.