Light Rail Collection ( LR)
Introduction
As early as 1957, Baltimore was studying viable options for a mode of mass transportation that would move thousands of people daily in and out of the downtown business district and alleviate much of the automobile congestion that accompanied the demise of the trolley lines several years prior. Harry J. Casey, Jr., former Director of the Mayor's Mass Transportation Committee, proposed a system based on Cleveland, Ohio, that used a combination light-rail/subway system to link Anne Arundel county, North West Baltimore and Sparrows Point using the old Baltimore and Annapolis Railroad to the south, the Western Maryland Railroad to the North West and portions of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to connect Sparrows Point. Mr. Casey further proposed the purchase of the B&O tunnel from Mt. Royal Station to Camden Yards Station for use as a subway link dontown, an idea he notes that had been brought up 40 years earlier.
Baltimore's traffic and Transit Director, Henry A. Barnes, envisioned a new mass transportation system that would use existing rail lines, ruling out a subway as cost-prohibitive, monorails as unsightly with their 30 inch supporting columns spaced every 100 feet and buses as both unpopular and ineffective.
In 1964, a study was contracted by the Metropolitan Transit Authority over a combined bus, light-rail, subway system versus an all bus system. The consulting firm of Parsons, Brinkhoff, Quade and Douglas estimated the cost of the combined system at $260 million and the all-bus system at $50 million. The committee sponsoring the study was leaning heavily towards the combined system of rapid transportation that would include: 1. A subway loop downtown; 2. A rail line from the loop to the plannned North-West Expressway; 3. A rail line from the subway loop up the Belair Road Corridor to the Beltway. The rapid transit system proposed would also include bus lanes in the future East-West Expressway and exclusive bus lanes in the Harbor Tunnel Expressway from its connection with the future Anne Arundel County Expressway to where it hooks up with the East-West Expressway. The future of this plan depends upon the completion of the oft delayed East-West Expressway.
Construction for the Central Corridor Light-Rail System was begun in 1990, with the first sections of track being laid in Timonium near the Maryland State Fairgrounds. Eventually planned to stretch from Hunt Valley in the north down to Dorsey Road in Anne Arundel county, the system will be approximately 27 miles long upon completion. In the northern portion, the system will make use of Conrails Northern Central Rail line and to the south, the old Baltimore and Annapolis railsroad.
Light-Rail Transit has proven to be a more cost-effective alternative to mass transportation than either Heavy Rail Transit or an Expressway. It is less destructive to neighborhoods and the environment, more popular with the public than the proposed bus-expressway system. With the new Orioles stadium at Camden Yards and the adjacent football stadium, the Light-Rail System should prove more popular in the coming years as an economical and hassle-free commute downtown.
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John Hoffman
April 30, 1996