Middle Patuxent Environmental Area - Mystery Car in the Woods

There is a car in the woods at the MPEA in Howard County, MD. Very much out of place now, but probably disposed of when the land was privately held and before it became an environmental property managed mostly for the benefit of various bird species and especially the woodcock. I met several birders on my hike there yesterday. Very nice and informative people. I also found my camera woefully inadequate for capturing small hyperactive birds. But I love a mystery. So I set out to identify the year, make and model of the abandoned auto hulk. Because all identifying markers, lettering or medallions, were gone, I focused on the bumpers and grilles of late 1950s and early 1960s, all American made of course, before the flood of foreign imports. Nobody made chrome bumpers and grilles like American car manufacturers in the 50s and 60s. The distinctive two over two headlights and turn signal sockets and the four hash marks on the fenders behind the headlights were the key markers I looked for, along with the beginning of the horizontal fin on the rear fender.  So here it is: the lovely 1958 Chevrolet Impala. I think I even found the right color. This photo I found here on an internet search. It is not one of my photos.

Woodstock to the Henryton Tunnel and Back

This morning I hiked the B&O Old Main Line from Woodstock to the Henryton tunnel, about three and half miles each way. It was a pretty stretch of track on a beautiful day. I saw two deer and a fox, which were too fast for me to get my camera ready.

The phrase "sylvan glades" captures the look of much of the track-side scenery, which included a fox's den.

The Henryton tunnel, built in 1903, is about a half mile west of Marriottsville Road and about a hundred yards past the 25 mile marker next to the track.          

There were no iron horses on rails today, probably because of tomorrow's holiday. However I did encounter some flesh and blood horses back at my starting point. It seems the "biker bar" at the Old Court / Woodstock Road rail crossing in Woodstock is as much a "horsewoman's bar" as it is a biker's. After I downed a brew with the boys, a few of the ladies let me photograph their rides.

This guy was the best looking of the herd and he just loved to pose.

All in all a very pleasant outing on a beautiful, sunny and cool day.

Another Cup of Coffee

The weekend job got cancelled this morning and I am so glad. It was a beautiful day for hiking. So, I hiked along the Old Main Line from Ilchester to Ellicott City for another cup of coffee at the Bean Hollow. Nice walk along the rails, maybe two miles covered easily in an hour.Took a break for a latte and a scone at the Hollow and walked back. Encountered three CSX trains along the way, two headed west, one eastbound. I did not expect to see anything interesting on this stretch of tracks, but I was surprised by a few items. First this interesting tipped over structure.

Obviously it was some sort of service building at one time. It's big, at least two stories tall when upright, and made of reinforced concrete. It appeared to have been tipped over backward right next to the rail bed. What the hell was it? I searched the web and learned that it was a coaling tower built during World War II at the small, but no longer existing, village of Lees to provide a coaling station away from the busy and congested rail yards in Baltimore. But what did it look like during its useful service? The answer to that question was a bit more difficult to find. But find it I did, and you can see a vintage photo of the Lee water tower penstocks and the very same coaling tower here. In the vintage photo you are looking west toward Ellicott City.

The other item of interest was a pair of maintenance of way machines parked at a dead end siding on the approach to Ellicott City.

This line of track was in a terrible state of disrepair seemed not to have been used in many years. Turns out is was a special siding devoted to the flour mill on the Baltimore County side of the Patapsco at Ellicott City. There is an old disused trestle bridge that once carried tracks from the mill to the siding along the Old Main Line. The siding is now used as a convenient parking place for rail maintenance machinery. And of course it would not be right to end without a shot of one of the trains encountered on my hike.

Woodpeckers, Herons, Bottles and Bricks

What you won't see here is a woodpecker. They were too high in the greenwood to be seen. But you should have heard them this morning along the Patapsco river between the Daniels dam and the Davis tunnel. They are thriving there. Eight o'clock must be the breakfast hour for pecker heads. They were hammering away all around me on both sides of the river for an entire hour. Then it stopped. Breakfast over. Things got quiet as a church on Tuesday morning.

This Great Blue Heron, which I stalked in both directions of my hike was a slow eater in comparison to the wood knockers. Ol' Blue was just patiently standing, strutting and strolling in the shallow river for at least two and a half hours, with an ocassional short flight to a new spot. The shallow, slow moving Patapsco must be a near perfect habitat for slow, patient, wading herons.

Even slower and more patient than herons are bottles and brick that have waited in the dirt a hundred years for me to find them. I returned today to the spot I wrote about on May 6th.  This time I looked more closely at the old bottles and bricks I noticed on my first visit. I found five antique beer bottles, all with their necks broken off. Three were from the Baltimore brewery, Gottlieb Bauernschmidt Straus (GBS), which existed from 1901 to 1920. The other two were from the Globe Brewery, that both preceded and succeeded GBS. All were embossed bottles. You can see cleaned up examples of them here as, # 11 and # 1. And a history of The Globe Brewing Company here. Based on the company history and the bottle designs I believe my previous guess that they are from circa 1906 is pretty accurate.

 

At this site I saw plain unmarked red clay building bricks and two kinds of white fire bricks stamped with a name. One was stamped or impressed with SAVAGE and the other with UNION. I believe they were likely manufactured by The Savage Fire Brick Company of Keystone Junction in Somerset County, PA. You can actually see illustrations of these two brick with the embossed names in the company's 1899 catalog. Again confirming my estimated dating of the site to the first decade of the twentieth century.

View From Above The Dorsey Tunnel

Hiked from the Alberton Road lot off Dogwood Road all the way to the east portal of the Dorsey tunnel. I decided to see if there was a walk around trail to the west opening. There wasn't a real path, but I followed a deer trail down onto the flood plain of the Patapsco until the hill came all the way down to the river and I was forced up at a very steep grade. Only a few deer hoof prints were visible on what was barely a trace. I did make it to the west portal as you can see, but I do not recommend doing this. Very steep, rough, slippery going. And you have to retrace the same tricky return passage. It was a workout. The hike made clear the reason the B&O decided to blast the tunnel through this ridge, which is 400 feet high. On the return hike I ran into the fellow below. He seemed kind of lonely, so I gave him some space for a personal ad.

Kiss Me!

Go ahead! What are you waiting for? I swear. I'm a prince of a guy.

Train Station at Point of Rocks, Maryland

This beautiful station, designed by Ephraim Francis Baldwin and completed in 1876, sits at the junction of the Baltimore and Ohio RR Old Main Line out of Baltimore and its Metropolitan Branch out of Washington. It is also where the B&O met the C&O Canal. The railroad and canal, after a nasty legal fight from 1828 to 1832, shared the right of way side by side along the Potomac river as far as Harper's Ferry. I visited the site this morning with my brother Chris before we hiked a few miles on the adjacent C&O Canal towpath. More photos here.

Apeiron Review, Issue 3

The latest issue of the literary webzine Apeiron Review, featuring two of my photos, one on the cover, is out. It can be dowmloaded in pdf or text format and according to the editors is best viewed on a tablet type device. Lots of great writing too. Enjoy!

Apeiron Review Issue 3: May 2013

Coal Trains

I spend a lot of my free time hiking on or near the CSX, B & O Old Main Line, which seems to carry more coal than any other freight. And I have observed and posted about the recent rail replacements with imported steel rails.

Tonight I was seized by the idea of a poem about coal trains. So I knocked out a two stanza, ten line poem and submitted it to a literary magazine for their consideration. Which means a four month wait until I hear if it will be published in the magazine. So that train is still a long way down the track from appearing here. But if you listen really hard you can hear it coming.

Now I can get some sleep.

Old Coal

During recent hikes along the original rail bed of the Baltimore and Ohio Old Main Line I noticed an old cut in a hill parallel to the rail bed, between it and the Patapsco river.

Yesterday I took a walk through that cut and noticed a few mounds of coal, some antique looking bottles and the top of an old earthenware jug. The coal piles looked like they had been dug out not long ago.

Close by were many scattered common red bricks and white fire bricks. I wonder if this was originally a small temporary blacksmith shop when the original track was being laid in the 1830s and 40s. Or when the original tracks were taken up after that section was abandoned around 1906. It was then that the Dorsey tunnel was excavated and the tracks were relocated on the other side of the river. More investigation is warranted.

The Baltimore and Osaka Railroad

Recent hikes along the CSX rails in the Patapsco river valley indicate that the replacement of the old 1958 U S Steel rails with 2012 Nippon Steel rails is done. It's a good thing the railroad is now named CSX or we would be talking about the Baltimore and Osaka and the Chesapeake and Osaka Railroads.

I met a nice immigrant Russian couple on today's hike and the man expressed surprise that American railroads are still using wooden ties when concrete ties are the norm in Europe. Maybe they can't make and ship concrete ties from Japan as cheaply as they can steel rails.

Two Snakes Along the Patapsco

A little snake

and a big snake.

The little snake was on the original rail bed, now a hiking path, on the Howard County side, upstream from Daniels, and the big snake was on the Baltimore County side just out of the Dorsey tunnel heading west toward the Davis tunnel. The little snake looks like an Eastern Gartersnake.