May 26, 2005 | Read Time: 8 minutes
Afterward, witnesses who had ventured out in the blizzard that night recalled seeing snowdrifts as deep as six feet
on the roof of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum’s landmark roundhouse, whose domed cupola had soared 122 feet above the intersection of Pratt and Poppleton Streets since 1884. Generations of Baltimoreans, along with rail fans and historians, knew the roundhouse as home to an extraordinary collection of early locomotives and other railroad equipment, a collection that traced its roots as far back as the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. It contained not only locomotives dating from the 1830s, the first decade of American railroading, but also rare early freight and passenger cars and much more.
The drifts had accumulated on one side of the roof, in the lee of a high drum of windows, while the wind swept the other side bare. When the first two roof sections gave way, their cast-iron trusses groaning and buckling under the combined weight of slate and snow, the collapse broke a six-inch sprinkler-system main and set off the sprinkler alarm. It was 11:15 p.m. on Sunday, February 16, 2003.
The museum’s facilities director, Steven Johnson, got the call about the alarm and made his way through the storm to the 22-bay roundhouse, where he first found four inches of water on the floor and then discovered the splintered wreckage of the roof over in bays 15 and 16. Mr. Johnson called the museum’s deputy director, Ed Williams, who told him to get out of the building immediately, but before he did, Mr. Johnson shut off the building’s utilities. The museum’s executive director, Courtney B. Wilson, climbed into his Jeep and came down to spend the night sitting with his wife among snowdrifts in the parking lot. “I was afraid to leave it alone,” Mr. Wilson says.
There was worse to come. More of the roof collapsed during the night — bays 6 through 10 about 5:20 a.m., and bays 11 through 14 sometime before 10 a.m. Fully half of the lower roof had fallen directly onto some of the most valuable items in the museum’s collection. The only good news was that Mr. Johnson’s decision to shut off the gas supply may have prevented a larger calamity: The collapse severed a three-inch gas line that could have caused a fiery explosion. Mr. Wilson, Mr. Williams, and Mr. Johnson called the museum’s insurance company and then started phoning around to engineers and contractors. Stefanie Fay, the museum’s director of administration and institutional advancement, put a statement up on the museum’s Web site that afternoon, and opened a “Roundhouse Restoration Fund” account at Mercantile Bank & Trust.
Two tense weeks passed while engineers stabilized and evaluated what remained of the roof, and while Mr. Wilson and his staff, operating out of their cars, negotiated with the insurers. Finally, after a meeting held in a passenger coach in the museum’s yard, the executive committee of the museum’s board announced that the museum would rebuild. Insurance would cover only about two-thirds of the cost, or $20-million, leaving the museum to find $10-million on its own — of which $8-million has since been raised.
Visitors were welcomed back late last year, after the museum had been closed for 22 months. But the “grand reopening” celebration will take place on Memorial Day weekend, complete with people in 19th-century costumes. What visitors will find is a restored roundhouse, new indoor and outdoor model-railroad displays, and a new wheelchair-accessible train platform. Visitors can use it to embark on an excursion on what Mr. Wilson notes is the “first mile and a half of railroad right-of-way in the Western Hemisphere.”
Also on display will be a new $5.3-million restoration facility in which the museum will be able to repair not only the locomotives damaged in the collapse but also other equipment. The museum is also more kid-friendly, with new displays and teaching areas for visiting school classes as well as wooden playground trains that kids can climb on.
Mr. Wilson says that while he is not prepared to recommend mid-blizzard disasters to other preservation institutions, the B&O Museum’s roof collapse has brought unexpected opportunities. It gave the staff a rare chance to rethink — and improve — almost every aspect of visitors’ experience at the museum. It brought international publicity, as well as outpourings of generosity. And the museum, which is dedicated to both education and preservation, had to declare only one piece of equipment a total loss: an 1868 passenger coach described as “extremely rare.”
Still, the past two years have been anything but easy. Insurance paid for rebuilding the entire lower roof, but then engineers determined that the smaller upper roof needed to be replaced as well, to meet modern building-code requirements — a $2-million job that insurance wouldn’t pay for. The new roof looks remarkably like the original, but it is significantly stronger.
Fortunately, Mr. Wilson says, the museum had interruption-of-business insurance that covered salaries and other expenses for a year. After that, Ms. Fay had to raise nearly $1-million to keep the museum running. Almost right away, Mr. Wilson told staff members to “tear up your job descriptions” and organized them into teams to deal with the most pressing needs — the housekeepers, for instance, were assigned to the collections team, helping to sift through the wreckage in the roundhouse to make sure nothing valuable was thrown out with the debris. A rare B&O tea bag was saved from a roundhouse exhibit about dining-car waiters, although some other small items were never recovered.
The bad news about the museum’s insurance was that it would cover only $5-million in damage to locomotives, cars, and other artifacts in the collection, and experts the museum brought in estimated repair costs to be far, far higher. It was Mr. Williams, the deputy director and chief curator, who proposed spending the money on a new repair facility, rather than on sending the equipment elsewhere for repairs.
The facility has four tracks, each large enough to accommodate the museum’s biggest locomotive, a 1941 Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Allegheny that weighs 389 tons. The repair facility will put to use a lot of antique machine-shop equipment that the museum has accumulated over the years — giant lathes for turning locomotive wheels, for instance — as well as a new 30-ton crane and new woodworking equipment donated by Black & Decker. In addition, the facility will have an observation platform for visitors and a classroom in which the museum hopes eventually to teach adults from depressed neighborhoods near the museum the skills they would need to become apprentices in the facility.
The museum’s history is unusual. The B&O had mounted locomotive displays as early as the 1876 exhibition, and its publicity agents kept an eye out for old equipment from the 1880s on. But the collection’s finest hour came in 1927, when the B&O celebrated its 100th birthday — and the 100th birthday of rail service in the United States — by mounting a two-week Fair of the Iron Horse. Visitors could watch a parade of locomotives that included 19th-century engines still in the roundhouse. “Our early collection really defines us,” Mr. Wilson says, noting that the collection’s holdings from the first 50 years of railroading are unmatched elsewhere. The B&O opened the roundhouse — a former passenger-car repair facility — as a museum in 1953. The B&O’s successor, CSX, turned the museum over to a nonprofit foundation in 1990.
Since the roof collapse, the museum’s most important benefactors have been the federal government and the State of Maryland, which have kicked in about $2-million each. The restoration fund Ms. Fay set up that first afternoon has attracted nearly $1-million, she says, mostly in small donations — although one anonymous rail fan sent $214,000 through a Florida bank. The museum has attracted grants to pay for the first three years’ worth of operations at the restoration facility, but Ms. Fay hopes to create a new $5-million endowment for the facility, to match the museum’s $5-million endowment. She also hopes to attract 200,000 paying visitors this year, and to increase the number of memberships. Other sources of revenue include sponsorships — Mr. Wilson says he wouldn’t name a locomotive for a company, but he would name an event — and rental of the roundhouse for evening events like dinners and dances. The 60-foot turntable, with its polished oak deck, makes a perfect dance floor.
For the time being, much of the damaged equipment stands behind plexiglass in the roundhouse — five steam locomotives, the oldest built in 1848, with crushed cabs, dented stacks, snapped-off whistles, and the like. An 1875 baggage car is in the worst shape, with its roof demolished. But it’s damage that can be repaired. “Don’t you think,” Mr. Wilson asks, “that leaving the damaged locomotives in here is the greatest silent tin cup ever?”
Lawrence Biemiller is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
