This book is a pictorial history looking back at the Western Maryland Railway through black and white photos during its glory years of operations in the 1950s, to its final years of pre-consolidation in the 1970s through color photography. It also takes a look at the railroad more than a decade after its merger into the Chessie System. We will also review a brief history on the "Queen City" (Cumberland, Maryland), as well as the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal.

Complete roster data, official diagrams and background material on the development of the Western Marylands fleet, and its use on this very popular line. Filled with FAs, BL2s, as well as the more common units and paint schemes, from the elegant and well respected fireball to the three-color Circus scheme on into the Chessie System paint.

This is a work about the Georges Creek Valley in Allegany County, Western Maryland. The Georges Creek Valley is defined by Dan's Mountain to the east, and Savage Mountain to the West, part of the Appalachian range. Portions of Savage Mountain form the Eastern Continental Divide, separating watersheds draining to the Ohio River and those draining to the Potomac River. The history of the settlement of the Georges Creek Valley is the history of coal. George Washington was familiar with the area from his various trips in the wilderness. Once populated entirely by Native Americans, the region was settled by the English, with families from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Besides coal, a pioneering iron furnace was built at Lonaconing, which drove the introduction of rail transportation in the region. Where George's Creek meets the Potomac, the C&O Canal was slated to pass by.

Take a nonstop journey through 131 years of the Western Maryland Railway's history in this photographic tale. The Western Maryland Railway was never a large Class 1 rail carrier, but during its 131 colorful years of existence, it provided extremely fast, efficient, and reliable freight; coal-hauling; and passenger service in the states it served. This book contains images from the history of this remarkable railroad and also provides the reader the opportunity to see how the legacy of the Western Maryland Railway is being maintained and remembered even today at some of its well-known train stations, such as in Cumberland and Union Bridge, Maryland, now home to the Western Maryland Railway Historical Society (WMRHS). The Western Maryland is now gone, but through the wonderful images captured and preserved by the WMRHS and private archival photograph collections, the dream of the railway will live on.

A. Aubrey Bodine, newspaper photographer, pictorialist, modernist, and documentarian, was a Baltimore Sun feature photographer from 1924 to 1970. This book is his archive of train photographs chronicling mid-20th-century rail transportation and the people working on the railroad. Bodine's images of steam and diesel locomotives document an era passed. Herein are contained award-winning pictures, currently popular pictures, historically interesting pictures, and pictures unseen until this volume. These images demonstrate Bodine's pictorialist and modernist photographic eye for trains and railroads in motion and at rest. Bodine published four books, wrote articles, judged photographic Salons, won awards from all over the world, lectured across northeast America, and held down a full-time job at a major metropolitan newspaper. This is the fourth Bodine picture book assembled by his daughter, Jennifer. Their previous collaborations are Bodine's Chesapeake Bay Country, Bodine's City, and Bodine's Industry.

Examines the history, services, accommodations, and problems of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway.

This book documents the construction of railroads in West Virginia, largely to access the untouched stands of timber in such counties as Upshur, Webster, Nicholas, and Randolph. Johnson Newlon Camden and Henry Gassaway Davis were the two men that were the driving forces behind these railroads. They were industrialists and politicians as well as friends and rivals. Camden built the Clarksburg, Weston and Glenville Railroad connecting Clarksburg and Weston in north central West Virginia. Completed in 1879, it was extended to Buckhannon in the fall of 1883. The West Virginia and Pittsburgh Railroad soon built extensions from Weston to the Gauley River and south from Buckhannon. Davis started construction of the West Virginia Central and Pittsburgh Railway in 1880, which followed the North Branch of the Potomac River south into Tucker and Randolph Counties. Sawmills and towns sprang up all along the railroads as vast quantities of lumber were harvested from the forests of West Virginia. As the forests were denuded, mines opened, more towns were built, and coal replaced lumber as the principal freight. While sections of the W. Va. & Pittsburgh have been abandoned, the present day successor to the B. & O. still hauls coal along these rail lines to the voracious power plants of the eastern United States. Author and railroad scholar Alan Clarke has once again offered an in-depth look at the building of railroads in West Virginia in the late nineteenth century. Much of the technical and historical information in the book will be of special interest to railroad buffs. However, Clarke's grasp of the state at that time in history, as well as the book's vintage photographs, maps, and illustrations, cause this book to appeal to anyone interested in the history of the Mountain State.