The Seawall Branch quickly opens into the Seawall Yard shown on the map, then continues east before turning south. This tour adopts CSX's approach of using Childs Street as the "0 mile" reference point.

Near photo center, the Seawall Branch splits from the Curtis Bay Branch and proceeds to serve the Fairfield and Wagner's Point industrial areas. The Seawall Branch is unsignalled, not counting the grade crossings of course. like this one of Shell Road. Curtis Bay Yard is on the left.

At the time of this photo, the dregs of Fairfield's shuttered 20th-century petrochemical plants lingered in the form of abandoned buildings, rusting equipment, layers of grime and swamp-broken asphalt, where the streets were paved at all.

Change for: Curtis Bay Branch tour at this site

In the years that followed, spurred by the expansion of a wastewater treatment plant, much cleanup work was done in the vicinity and now the area looks a lot more welcoming and a lot less of a wasteland than it had. Note the weedy brush that had grown along the CSX tracks is now tended grassland. One technology change: CSX replaced the mechanical warning bells atop the Shell Road grade crossing warning poles with electronic noisemakers.

Before the railroad expanded and I-895 barged through, this area was occupied by the town of Masonville. In the 1927 aerial (photo courtesy Johns Hopkins University), Masonville is the group of buildings at center near where the Seawall Branch splits off from the tracks bound for Curtis Bay Yard at bottom. Bales of hay dot the that time period's farms.

Link: Masonville history

When its too cold to railfan, action pics shot from inside a warm car are preferred, like this one at Shell Road. This is the branch's busiest grade crossing. Seawall Yard is just beyond the right edge of this photo.

Things were quieter in 2001 before the cleanup. That's an empty Seawall Yard at distant left center. Note the junk pile at distant right.

Link: last B&O-painted engine 1996

A similar view years later: less junk, more trains. The Fairfield Auto Terminal (left) has expanded substantially since 2001, hence the autoracks. Frankfurst Avenue parallels on the left.

Two tracks peel off from Seawall Yard at the Childs Street intersection and cross Frankfurst Avenue. I-895, the Harbor Tunnel Thruway, is on the left. For CSX, the Seawall Branch, identifier BBQ, begins here and proceeds ahead, but we'll first follow the spur on the left.

After the shadow of I-895, one of the spur tracks heads right, the other left, both bound for automobile lots. New cars are shipped from/to the port. This spur has been serving various industries here since at least the 1920s. CSX later repurposed the lot on the right for double stack assembly.

The Howard Street Tunnel closed in February 2025 for enlargement to permit the passage of double-stacked consists. The tunnel work was scheduled to consume most of 2025.

Soon after the closure, however, double stacks began to appear for the first time on CSX lines like the Cap Sub. Some originate here in Fairfield adjacent I-895 where containers are offloaded from ships. It recalls the car float process B&O employed to get across Baltimore during the 1800s before it built the Howard Street Tuunel.

Detours at this site: B&O car float at Canton, Howard Street Tunnel

A Mi-Jack Products Piggy Packer grabs onto the top of a container then eases it into a low-slung well car. Well cars allow the bottom container to sit below the top of the car's wheels. That leaves enough room to stack another container on top yet permit the pair to squeeze under main line road bridges.

Link: Piggy Packer history

In the auto lots, a few dozen new 2015 Alfa Romeos, probably the Brera model, were being kept tidy for their upcoming owners. I'll take mine in red. Too bad there's all the fences, guards and activity here. Oh well.

A steady convoy of Jeeps previously disgorged by autoracks on this day rolled past to refill ships that had transported the Alfa Romeos across the Atlantic Ocean. Their windows are protectively covered, except for cutout areas for loader/driver visibility.

Wallenius Wilhelmsen's Tugela cargo vessel can carry almost 8000 automobiles across 5 interior decks.

At nearly 100 million pounds weight when empty, plus a cargo carrying capacity of about 30 million pounds, ships like Grimaldi's Grande Napoli are huge. Even Mick Jagger would be in awe of this ship's tongue-like, multi-lane ramp into a multi-deck interior.

East of the car import/export operation, a different spur peels from the Seawall Branch to serve state facilities near the western end of the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. That's the asphalt of Frankfurst Avenue at photo bottom.

East of that had been another spur, one that curved and crossed over the Harbor Tunnel Thruway via the bridge on which the "Maintain 45 Thru Tunnel" sign is mounted.

The bridge fell into disuse about 1970 but was not removed until soon after this 2005 aerial photo.

Now, when driving you can see where it had been by finding the area of replacement masonry that does not exactly match the original stone walls.

That masonry is the rectangular area of darker stone near the top of the wall at the left side of the year 2020 photo at left. The bright stripes on the right-side wall reflect other maintenance underway at the time.

The lighter concrete at left shows where the bridge had been. Rails leading to/from it were left embedded in the pavement.

This aerial photo, on display at the Masonville Cove Environmental Education Center, illustrates whence we came. The connection bridge over the Harbor Tunnel Thruway is off photo right.

The largest Buffalo Tank building at left has survived into the 2010s, as seen in the next photo.

Link: Masonville Cove Environmental Education Center

A disused spur connects to Buffalo Tank, one of the last vestiges of Bethlehem Steel's presence in Baltimore. This site has filled many needs, including ship building (WWII), ship dismantling (post-WWII) and similar industrial activities. This was part of the expansive Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard where the SS Patrick Henry, the first of many US Liberty Ships of WWII, was built and launched.

Links: SS Patrick Henry, shipyard pics, 1943

Frankfurst Avenue finally runs out of land at Chesapeake Terminal, or what the railroad calls Arundel Curve, named for the Arundel Sand and Gravel Company. TDSI (a division of CSX), Vane Brothers and others associated with automobile import/export keep busy here.

Beyond Arundel Curve, to which this view looks back, things get less formal thanks to sparse train activity. For example, there are no stone culverts here, nor steel pipe ones, merely white plastic ones to assist with drainage.