Train Depot Site

The take

Then the 1933 hurricane took out the trestle and ended the rail era literally overnight. The marker here is all that's left of how everyone used to arrive.

Heritage context

• Baltimore and Eastern Shore Railroad

  Founded 1886 · active today

  Chartered April 1, 1886 to give Baltimore a short route to the Atlantic coast, with Ocean City named as its 'extreme eastern terminus.' It bought the Wicomico and Pocomoke Railroad — Salisbury to Ocean City, thirty-one miles — in 1888, and built its own line from Salisbury north-west to Claiborne on the Chesapeake in 1889 and 1890. On July 1, 1890 its president Joseph B. Seth and B&O counsel J. E. Cowen consolidated four companies at Baltimore into a single 108-mile system from Annapolis to Ocean City: the Bay Ridge road, the one-mile Chesapeake Terminal road, the B&ES itself and the W&P, bonded for $1,600,000 in 5 per cent thirty-year gold bonds dated July 1, 1890. Chapter 158 of the Maryland Acts of 1890 sent county subscriptions to its capital stock to the voters of Talbot, Dorchester, Wicomico and Caroline on November 4, 1890 — the counties having earlier voted to endorse its bonds, a scheme that collapsed when Baltimore City would not endorse them. The first through train ran in September 1890 and the company dated its formal opening December 1, 1890. Its rolling stock that October was five locomotives, 117 cars and one transfer steamer, much of it on car trust. It was in receivership within a year, and was consolidated in the 1890s into the Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic Railway.

• Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic Railway

  Until 1933

  The Eastern Shore railway whose predecessor lines brought the excursion trade that built Ocean City. Financially it died young: unprofitable by 1921 as automobiles crossed the 1916 bridge, it survived on Pennsylvania Railroad subsidy until the PRR stopped covering its mortgage in 1922, and the August 1933 hurricane's destruction of the Sinepuxent trestle merely buried a railroad that was already broke. Rail service to Ocean City never resumed. THE END CAME IN NOVEMBER 1927: the Chatham-Phenix National Bank and Trust Company of New York, trustee, filed a foreclosure bill. No coupon had been paid on the $1,250,000 five per cent gold bond issue since 1 March 1922 — which corroborates the registry's own 1922 default — and $375,000 of back interest had accrued by 1 September 1927. The Pennsylvania Railroad, which had sunk more than $2,500,000 in the road, offered $501.04 per $1,000 bond. Ten bay steamers, the wharves and the Claiborne–Ocean City railroad were to be sold, and the Piankatank, Pocomoke-Occahannock, Choptank and Choptank-Wicomico-Nanticoke routes abandoned. BUT THE OCEAN CITY RAIL LINE AND THE LOVE POINT FERRY WERE EXPRESSLY EXCEPTED. So the resort line outlived the corporate collapse by six years; it was killed by the 1933 storm, not by the receivership. IT ENDED AT AUCTION ON 29 MARCH 1928, at Pier 6, Light Street Wharf, Baltimore, under a decree of Judge William C. Coleman. Total indebtedness as of October 1927 was $1,710,410.65. The Pennsylvania Railroad was the ONLY BIDDER and took it for $1,000,000 in two parcels — $650,000 for the rail line from Claiborne to Ocean City, $350,000 for the steamships and piers. On 22 November 1928 the Interstate Commerce Commission authorised the Baltimore & Eastern Railroad Company to acquire and operate the 88-mile line for $650,000 of fifty-dollar-par stock.

  The lifeline that launched the resort, dead twelve years before the storm got the blame.