This map covers the yards served by the Curtis Bay Branch. Note the aerial photo is from the 1960s and therefore does not reflect changes since that time.

Opposite the LED signal the tracks do math: they divide and multiply their way to Curtis Bay Yard. The distant bridge carries I-895, the Harbor Tunnel Thruway, over the western neck of the yard. Because the bridge towers over most everything in the vicinity it makes a good reference point for photos below.

We have reached what the railroad considers the start of the Curtis Bay Branch (we've been touring the opposite direction, eastward from the main at Zepp's Bridge). From here east CSX calls it Curtis Bay Yard plus the Marley Neck Industrial Track. If this is confusing, don't worry since the branch start and end points are not terribly important for tour purposes.

CSX 5412 and family are partially visible from westbound I-895. The Baltimore stack more readily seen from I-95 at I-395 can be found above photo center.

Efforts to see railroad action from the I-895 bridge are poor westbound, and marginal eastbound, instead one needs to navigate and explore via the local roads. It's cheaper, too, since there's no way to cross this span without paying the Harbor Tunnel toll, $4 each way as of 2015, ten times what it was when the Harbor Tunnel Thruway opened Thanksgiving Weekend 1957. Yes, the opening was 72 hours too late to handle the pre-turkey day travel crunch.

The $4 toll is roughly in line with inflation since 1957, however the bonds that paid for tunnel construction should have been fully repaid years ago. Now where is that money going?

I-895 is chronically underutilized due to the toll and due to the intentional lack of exit ramps, a design that perhaps made sense in 1950, but that is now outdated. Meanwhile, the nearby I-695 Beltway is routinely overloaded, and its interchange with I-95 difficult. An entry ramp from I-695's inner loop to westbound I-895 south of Hollins Ferry Road would ease that congestion. Also inexpensive since no elevated roadway is needed would be exit ramps from eastbound I-895 to Hammonds Ferry Road as well as to eastbound Patapsco Avenue.

Eastbound you can glimpse Curtis Bay Yard between onrushing girders. One does not often see a CSX engine adjacent a MARC car.

Before the railroad expanded and I-895 barged through, this was the site of the town of Masonville. The town name still appears on some road signage.

For those who want to purchase authentic CSX-brand merch, CSX has a shop. Well, not exactly since this is repair shop. A tiny sliver of the I-895 bridge appears at photo left edge.

Before B&O expanded the yards during the early 1950s, Chesapeake Avenue had connected through under the tracks here. The shop dates to the mid-1960s.

Links: 1947 "tunnel" pic, 1966 inside

Waiting to see the car shop doctor...

The various signs near the car shop display:

• Entering Hard Hat Area Do Not Go Outside of Green Area Without Hard Hat
  
• CSX Transportation Property - No Parking - Violators Towed At Owners Expense
  
• Brake Stick Use is Mandatory
  
• High 5 - Briefing Fouling Shoving Switching Securing - Baltimore Division

Now we're on the other (east) side of the yard. By now you recognize the I-895 bridge, but less obvious at the left edge is the slanting roof of CSX's Car Shop seen earlier.

The tracks crossing Shell Road at grade lead to Seawall Yard and port docks off to the right. This is the busiest grade crossing in the Curtis Bay area.

Change for: Seawall Branch tour

Like hogs bound for the slaughterhouse, at the southern end of the yard coal cars are herded toward the pier. The coal is either transfered directly to ships or distributed via the distant towers for temporary open-air storage in huge mounds.

Curtis Bay is CSX's largest yard in the area. It's difficult to get a feel for the size because there are so few high spots from which to view it. This photo, like the previous, is from a ramp from Shell Road to I-895, an awkward spot to reach on foot and not a recommended railfanning location.

Back at track level, Shell Road parallels the yard's east side. The tracks closest to the camera are the main ones to the coal pier which in this view is behind us. This is the last we'll see of our reference I-895 bridge, now more distant.

Shell Road is likely named for the oil company. Many petroleum companies have distribution facilities at neighboring Fairfield and Wagners Point, among them Sunoco, Kinder Morgan, and Colonial.

Curtis Bay Yard's 21st century footprint had been established by 1927. This photo extends about 1 mile north-south.

The yard was redesigned around 1970 with a track loop that trains follow in a clockwise direction. The transfer towers do not yet appear in this view from 1972. Patapsco Avenue runs left-right across the top. The next photo was snapped near the upper left corner of this one.

For the bottleneck of three Patapsco Avenue bridges, the yard's 50+ tracks trim down to seven. In this view, the yard is on the left, the piers on the right.

Link: 1947

CSX 4601 is the poster boy for safety at Curtis Bay Piers, which is ironic since this ex-Conrail unit was battered in an accident, or perhaps as iconoclastically as the Great Sphinx.

Different methods are used to transfer of coal from rails to ships depending on whether ships are being loaded directly or the coal is being held at the pier awaiting the next ship. Most ships that depart here are bound for Europe, but some make a trip through the Suez Canal to Pacific Ocean border countries.

This sign welcomes visitors to the "safest and most evironmentally friendly terminal". It's not clear how those superlatives are measured, but 470 work safe days (in a row?) sounds good. Signs like these seem at odds with the demands of a job, for example, there's always some sort of deadline encouraging faster work, which usually forces cutting corners and doing things less safely.

Opposite the sign is this CSX purple martin birdhouse. Perhaps houses for bluebirds and goldfinches would better fit the corporate colors, but it's a start. The marshes of Stonehouse Cove teem behind the birdhouse.

This dumper turns full coal cars and spills their contents onto a conveyor that whisks the coal directly to a waiting ship. During cold weather residual water can freeze the coal into the car, necessitating thawing by steam or radiant heat.

Link: view into dumper

It's not spring that has made the dumper more colorful, instead it's merely the lack of glare when viewed from the east side of Stonehouse Cove.

During the first half of the 20th century, beyond the dumper on the right had been the Maryland Car Wheel Works, provider of railcar wheels to the B&O and other railroads in the area.

When active, these cranes scooped up coal left by previous trains and gave it a ride onto a ship. B&O installed the cranes and the dumper around 1950.

I once visited an energy company near the Arctic Circle to help them solve unique challenges they faced. Employees were being paid very high wages due to the harsh conditions, then had nothing to spend it on during long, -40 degree winter nights. Alcoholism was rampant.

Depending on the cargo ship, different sets of cranes and conveyors are employed to transport the export coal the final leg of its journey for its first bon voyage.

The closeup at right shows coal pouring from the conveyor into the ship's hold.

Links: 1951, 1952

The tugboat Zeus dates to 1974, and has spent most of its life on the Great Lakes. On this day it had been positioning barges as they waited for a coal refill.

Link: Zeus

You have to stand almost a half mile away to capture all the yard's coal transfer towers in one photo. Views like this became possible during 2023 thanks to redevelopment of waterfront property.

CSX removed the red dumper and its unique conveyor to barges around 2021. Now the barges must dock at the big boys table (the piers a bit farther south).

Link: source photo

One CSX is a mission statement of 2022 incoming CSX CEO Joe Hinrichs to rally employees to work toward a common goal. Judging by the CSX company store, there are two logo versions: one hyphenated, one not.

Link: CSX company store

Specialized equipment moves the hoppers around the yard, such as unit 6 with slugs 6B and 6C. These might be Johnson Rail Services equipment since there also exists a model AC44CW CSX 6. The half height slugs add traction for pulling long groups of heavy coal hoppers.

Link: CSX 6 in Sykesville, MD

Also on hand is Johnson Rail Services 5313, a former Canadian National engine. The lack of a big digit 6 tells you this is not the same engine as in the prior photo.

Links: 1980, 2015

The Amis Unicorn can carry 77,000 tons, which equals about 700 hoppers of coal, or several trains worth.

"98% of people agree others should use renewable energy." Get ready to adapt to climate change because few want limits on their creature comforts, travel options, or how many children thay can have. Earth's human population might stop increasing before 2100 but that's still too late to halt climate change. Besides, a more-active Sun has been melting glaciers for several thousand years, and there's no sign that solar trend will reverse anytime soon. Continued warming is expected to make Earth too hot for mammals by about 250 million years from now.

Highly-specialized conveyor equipment can interface with ship portals of various designs.

Ironically, fossil fuel burning had likely net decreased global temperatures from 1940 until 1975 (link below) when well-meaning-but-ill-fated clean air laws in many countries forced scrubbing of the cooling sulfates -- but allowed warming CO2 emissions to continue. That means we can reduce the rate of global warming right now by temporarily relaxing clean air regulations until there is more renewable energy. Smog isn't good either, but it might be a lesser evil than more warming. Relaxing sulfate removal is probably the quickest and least expensive temporary climate remedial measure because it involves cessation of something already being done, rather than new efforts or new technology.

Fusion power would solve CO2 issues, but a practical implementation of it looks to be decades away (2050? 2100?).

Link: global cooling 1940 to 1975

Methane buildup led to an explosion at one of the coal transfer towers during 2021.

Link: source photo

The Piers are a large operation, so large that looking back from the public streets near the South Entrance we find nothing that had been visible from the North. The facility, where the tracks form a large loop that trains travel clockwise, is the better part of a mile in length.

The Curtis Bay Piers logo includes mountain shapes, which is quite appropriate...

... since CSX can make mountains out of coal hills. *rimshot*

When after World War II people opted to travel by auto rather than train, coal became a relatively more important rail customer. C&O was better positioned than B&O in coal country, and consequently was in better financial shape when the two (plus WM) were combined into Chessie System during 1973.

Link: yard slugs 2014

The coal cars in the foreground had been recently emptied. Unseen on the right others were being emptied, one by one, then added onto the string of empties such that the ones here would make room by rolling to the left, pausing, then rolling again, about two car-lengths per minute.

Freshly dumped coal is conveyed to the top of these towers where it is poured so as to flow by gravity out the windows scattered in the concrete columns. The 8 such towers at this facility were built during the 1970s.

Emptied cars huddle in return areas north and west of the coal mountain before they can bum a lift back into the Appalachians.

The buildings over 3 miles distant at upper left are the same silos-to-condos seen in the Locust Point Tour. Locust Point has faded for railroad purposes, and even CSX gets confused, for years depicting it in their Annual Report (right) as south of Curtis Bay whereas actually the reverse is true. Someone noticed this mention because CSX corrected the map in their 2016-published report.

The track in the foreground skirts the pier entirely because it is headed south (behind us) for Marley Neck and Hawkins Point, a tour of which is linked below.