(rshsdepot) B&P Junction interlocking tower, Baltimore MD (now at Sykesville, MD)

["James Dent" <james.dent_@_itochu.com>]

-From The Bullsheet...
For those who haven't read it, Allen Brougham's Bullsheet provides an
interesting newsletter with many of Allen's personal anecdotes as a tower
operator, and such included.  Allen recently retired from CSX and now has
taken a part time job as a driver of a crew van out of Brunswick, MD.  The
newsletter is online at: http://www.bullsheet.com/index.html


B&P Tower Comes Back to Life

The former B&P Junction interlocking tower, which from 1910 until 1988
served the south end of Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station, is once again
alive and well. Its new home is in Sykesville, Maryland, where the building
now serves as a welcome and information center.

The story of how this particular building came to find its place so many
miles from its traditional haunt, along a different railroad, is somewhat
subtle, with a mix of good fortune - perhaps even being a miracle.

The tower, named for the old Baltimore and Potomac Railway, stood vacant
-From the time it closed in July 1988 until just before it was slated for
demolition to make way for the Penn Station light-rail extension in 1995. To
its rescue came the city of Bowie, Maryland, which decided to acquire the
building for its "historical and esthetic value," but not necessarily to use
it as a railroad-related artifact. Bowie already had one tower - the one
that had served Bowie itself until 1988 and then got moved to a nearby park.
It was decided that B&P could be put to use in one of the other city parks,
possibly as a boat house.

B&P Tower's top floor was dismantled (its base remained at the original site
and remains there today) and its parts were stored in an unprotected state.
Plans for the park project never reached fruition.

Enter then the town of Sykesville, Maryland. In 1999, the salvageable parts
(those that had not deteriorated too badly for use) found a new home in
Sykesville, and there, within a few steps of the town's historic train
station (now a restaurant), B&P Tower sprang back to life. Its upstairs
office portion is now open to the public the first Sunday of every month
where members of the S&P (Sykesville & Patapsco) Railway are modeling the
area in N-scale. It is an ongoing project. The new base of the building
includes public restrooms plus some additional space currently used for
storage.

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