Imagine the merchants, bankers and builders of Baltimore envisioning and creating a space satellite made of local labor and parts.
Then move backward to the Baltimore of the 1820s and 1830s when the goal of merchants, bankers and builders was to build the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
The object was not scientific exploration. The target was trade and commerce. And for forces of gravity, they encountered the rock of the Allegheny Mountains and the terrain of the Patapsco and Potomac river valleys.
"Impossible Challenge II" from Bernard, Roberts and Co. of Baltimore is a new book detailing the B&O;'s daunting task of going west from Baltimore with picks and shovels and carloads of Irish immigrant workers. The book carries a subtitle, "Baltimore to Washington and Harpers Ferry from 1828 to 1994," and that pretty much sums up its mission and sweep of years. It is a fine addition to the growing bookshelf of local industrial history.
It is part geography lesson, engineering assignment and essay in Maryland history. It also delivers carloads of detail you've never read in any other book. This is high praise in the highly trafficked yards of railway publication.
The author is Herbert H. Harwood Jr., a retired CSX administrator who lives on Stevenson Road in the Wiltondale section of Baltimore County with his wife Janice. This is the author's eighth book on railroading.
Harwood's style is fluid and wry. He's strong on research and analysis. He shows how the early builders of the B&O; acted like Roman generals and engineers, constructing aqueducts and bridges. He shows how slowly but inexorably, the Industrial Revolution made its mark here.
"This same railroad which was launched by the survivors of the Declaration of Independence would play a crucial role in holding the Union together [at the Civil War] and also turn out to be the instrument which spawned an industrial revolution in this nation," the author writes.
The B&O; changed the face of both Baltimore and Maryland. It was once our largest employer. President John Garrett's rails "were the servants and developers of the port of Baltimore."
It is due to the line's trade agreement with the old North German Lloyd shipline that thousands of German, Russian, Polish and Lithuanian immigrants came through Baltimore.
Mr. Harwood's explanation of the workings of Washington's Union Station sheds much light on this mighty terminal that recently has been encumbered with all the gaudy tinsel of a "festival marketplace."
Those who believe that Baltimore's home town railroad can be written off had better think again. Indeed, the days are gone when well corseted ladies from Maryland Avenue climbed aboard B&O; blue and gray coaches for Cincinnati or Chicago.
But just stand at Mount Royal Avenue and listen for long freight trains that emerge from the Howard Street Tunnel at what seems like intervals of every 30 minutes. Or look at the crowds who in ever increasing numbers board MARC commuter trains on the Camden Line at Laurel or St. Denis.
Never was the staying power of the B&O; demonstrated as it was at the first Orioles exhibition game in April 1992. Its former rails, now part of the CSX system, carried thousands to Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The scene is repeated throughout the baseball season.
I wonder how many fans knew that the terminus for the commuter coaches was precisely the same place where slain President Abraham Lincoln's casket was carried from a B&O; car in 1865 as part of his funeral procession through Baltimore?
I also wonder how many Sunday afternoon tourists who stroll the main streets of Ellicott City and Sykesville understand the role of the tracks that slice through these two ancient towns?
"Impossible Challenge II" is appropriately large and heavy, brimming with photos. It weighed in at nearly four pounds on my bathroom scales. At $65, that's something more than $16 a pound, the price of crab meat. Those interested in rail history should gobble it up like hungry patrons at an oyster roast.
It is bound like a high school textbook. And like a school publication, it will doubtless establish itself as the standard on the subject.