The B&O Railroad Museum is a museum exhibiting historic railroad equipment in Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) company originally opened the museum on July 4, 1953, named the Baltimore & Ohio Transportation Museum. It has been called one of the world’s most significant collections of railroad treasures and has the most extensive collection of 19th-century locomotives in the U.S. The museum is located in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s old Mount Clare Station and adjacent roundhouse. It retains 40 acres of the B&O’s sprawling Mount Clare Shops site, where, in 1829, the B&O began America’s first railroad and is the oldest railroad manufacturing complex in the United States.
Mount Clare is considered the birthplace of American railroading, as the site of the first regular railroad passenger service in the U.S., beginning on May 22, 1830. It was also to this site that the first telegraph message, “What hath God wrought?” was sent on May 24, 1844, from Washington, D.C., using Samuel F. B. Morse’s electric telegraph.
The museum houses collections of 19th- and 20th-century artifacts related to America’s railroads. The collection includes 250 pieces of railroad rolling stock, 15,000 antiques, 5,000 cubic feet (140 m3) of archival material, four significant 19th-century buildings, including the historic roundhouse, and a mile of track considered the most historic mile of railroad track in the United States. Train rides are offered on the mile of track on Wednesday through Sunday from April through December and on weekends in January. In 2002, the museum had 160,000 visitors annually. EZ Bed Bug Exterminator Baltimore
The museum also features an outdoor G-scale layout, two indoor HO scale models, and a wooden model train for children to climb on. From Thanksgiving through the New Year, local model railroad groups set up large layouts on the roundhouse floor and in select locations on the museum grounds. A museum store offers toys, books, DVDs, and other railroad-related items. The museum and station were designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1961. In 2008, the Museum won three awards in Nickelodeon’s Parents’ Picks Awards Best Museum for Little Kids, Best Indoor Playspace for Little Kids, and Best Indoor Playspace for Big Kids. Television and film actor Michael Gross is the museum’s “celebrity spokesman”..”.”
The museum definitively documented 24 Freedom Seekers that used the B&O Railroad on their journeys on the Underground Railroad – 8 of which traveled through the museum’s historic site of Mount Clare. In 2021, the museum’s Mt Clare Station building was designated as a National Park Service Underground Railroad Network to Freedom site. The museum also hosts an annual Day out with Thomas event, complete with the train’s excursion, including a non-powered Thomas the Tank Engine replica.
Address: 901 W Pratt St, Baltimore, MD
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