Overview

The B&O Railroad Museum is a museum and historic railway station exhibiting historic railroad equipment in Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) company originally opened the museum on July 4, 1953, with the name of the Baltimore & Ohio Transportation Museum. It has been called one of the most significant collections of railroad treasures in the world and has the largest collection of 19th-century locomotives in the U.S. The museum is located in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s old Mount Clare Station and adjacent roundhouse, and retains 40 acres of the B&O’s sprawling Mount Clare Shops site, which is where, in 1829, the B&O began America’s first railroad and is the oldest railroad manufacturing complex in the United States.

Mount Clare is considered to be a birthplace of American railroading, as the site of the first regular railroad passenger service in the U.S., beginning on May 22, 1830. It was also to this site that the first telegraph message, “What hath God wrought?” was sent on May 24, 1844, from Washington, D.C., using Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph.  The museum houses collections of 19th- and 20th-century artifacts related to America’s railroads. The collection includes 250 pieces of railroad rolling stock, 15,000  artifacts, 5,000 cubic feet (140 m3) of archival material, four significant 19th-century buildings, including the historic roundhouse, and a mile of track, considered the most historic mile of railroad track in the United States. Train rides are offered on the mile of track on Wednesday through Sunday from April through December and on weekends in January. In 2002, the museum had 160,000 visitors annually. The museum and station were designated as a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1961. The B&O Railroad Museum possesses the oldest and most comprehensive American railroad collections in the world. Dating from the beginning of American railroading, the collection contains locomotives and rolling stock, historic buildings, railroading artifacts, and an extensive archives and research library that documents the impact of American railroading and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad on American economics, culture, and history.