This aerial photo from 1964 captured Western Maryland's operation near its max footprint at Port Covington, WM's eastern terminus in Baltimore. After crossing under a Hanover Street bridge, WM's rails coming from the west (left) fanned out to serve a power plant, several separate waterfront docks, tall silos and other typical yard features such as a roundhouse. Only a small fraction of those rails remain, key ones drawn in black on the map. Newer features, such as Interstate 95 and the Baltimore Sun's printing facility, are overlaid for reference.

This aerial captures Port Covington during the Roaring Twenties. The Hanover Street Bridge (left) only eight years before had replaced 1856's Long Bridge that had extended Light Street off the tip of land near lower left. This portion of Light Street is now named West Peninsula Drive. Railroad grade separation of Light and Hanover Streets was still in the future.

WM's Spring Garden Swing Bridge crosses Middle Branch (of the Patapsco River) at upper left, which this tour page will reach by proceeding generally west (left) after starting off the right side of this photo.

Hanover Street had been grade separated at upper right by the time of this photo. WM's port operations had grown substantially from those in the 1924 view. The Gould Street Generating Station (smokestacks) provides a reference point for photos that follow below.

Link: source photo

The Key Highway exit from elevated Interstate 95 North provides an easy vantage point of the northeastern corner of WM's Port Covington Yard. This segment of I-95 is built over the edge of WM's coal hopper area for the Gould Street Generating Station, which is the tall stack and red brick building at photo center.

The large vessel at distant right floats on waters of Winans Cove where the Patapsco River begins to widen into the Chesapeake Bay. As the tour will show, the rails of WM served many docks at the Cove.

Note the tracks between the power station and the I-95 ramp. That's the next stop of the tour...

The Gould Street Generating Station began operation in 1905 and for most of its early life burned coal, later switching to natural gas. The station was decomissioned in 2019, then demolished during 2020.

The other side of the building had been WM's easternmost reach. These rails are part of the primary surviving tracks through the Port area. For identification this tour calls them the "main line".

I do not know WM's approach to milepost numbering, so this tour references distance relative to CSX's Hanover Subdivision, the current name for much of WM's former trackage in Maryland. CSX puts the Hanover Subdivision's milepost 0 in Westport and counts upward west of there. Since Westport is about 2 miles west of here, this tour uses negative mile numbering to begin.

Links: ~1940, power station interior

B&O had served facilities east of the power plant, but those tracks were severed during the 1980s by the completion of I-95 through Baltimore City. As a substitute, an extension was built from what had been WM, that now, per the sign, falls under control of the M.P.A. (Maryland Port Administration).

A spur from the MPA tracks reaches TE SubCom, aka Tyco Electronics Subsea Communications LLC.

Huge ships such as the Tyco Dependable drop fiber optic communications cables upon the Atlantic Ocean seabed. Some of those cables come ashore in this vicinity, and may be among those tapped by the NSA's clandestine surveillance program known as PRISM. This helps explain the fencing and the general nervousness about visitors. If you railfan in Port Covington, particularly with a camera in hand, be prepared to be spied upon and questioned.

B&O's / CSX's Riverside Yard was little scathed by I-95's arrival but did get a new engine turntable out of the deal. In the photo above, it's behind the coal cars and unseen off the right edge.

That turntable is accessible from Riverside Yard. The photo of it on the right looks southwest back toward Gould Street and the power plant (the tall stack). Gould Street was named for WM rail baron George Gould.

Link: Gould fortune

Rails embedded in Gould Street hint more had been here. Indeed, many tracks had bottlenecked down to a few, with only the one on right, the "main line", still capable of train traffic. The white building at distant left houses printing equipment of the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

Port Covington was preceded by Fort Covington in this vicinity from 1813 to 1836. It was named after Brigadier General Leonard Covington.

At Winans Cove along Port Covington's southeast edge, where previously WM had loaded and unloaded cargo, large ships still tie up. The Cape Washington is part of the US Ready Reserve Force (RRF) that can be called into action upon short notice. One of its main duties is to transport military vehicles, but while pierside hosts various scientific experiments onboard.

These WM docks had been roof-covered for all-weather train offload/onload operation but since the 1980s have been left to deteriorate. Segments of steel rails remain on top. Those sharp-eyed will recognize the coal towers of CSX's Curtis Bay Piers some three miles in the distance.

Link: 1929

Plans from the 1990s to develop Port Covington into a shopping and casino mecca disintegrated after developers failed to attract more than Walmart to the site. Awkward access plus failure to put to good use the Port's most attractive aspect -- its water views -- doomed that plan from the start.

The burgeoning Under Armour company in 2015 purchased large land tracts at Port Covington as well as Westport with smarter ideas for mixed use, including housing. Across from the WM docks, Under Armour's presence is already stenciled onto the side of the former Walmart, with more to come under the area's new name of Baltimore Peninsula.

Link: what went wrong

WM gave coal exports a rollercoaster ride onto a ship via this unique high lift dumper. Off photo left, a rotary dumper picked up hoppers and turned them upside down to pour their coal onto the conveyor system. This machine is no longer extant.

Links: source photo, rotary dumper

Activity at Port Covington peaked during the 1940s and 1950s before trucks on interstates disrupted the railroad business. By 1948, a ramp was added to connect the Hanover Street bridge (left) with the WM yard. Elevated I-95 would cut across this side of the distant storage tanks and buildings circa 1980. Some of those tanks, visible from I-95, were during the 21st century painted with crab, horse and Ft. McHenry art.

Link: photo source

This 1948 view has the power station at upper right and the intersection of Hanover and McComas Streets at upper left. Note a WM roundhouse and turntable at bottom center, below and left of a tall grain elevator.

Link: South Baltimore Peninsula Post

Some online references claim WM's grain elevator was seen in a Season 5 (?) episode of The Wire, but the timing is not right. The Wire filmed during the first decade of the 2000s, but WM's elevator was torn down around 1990. The silos seen in this screen capture are probably from B&O's grain elevator in Locust Point.

The photog is standing at the site of WM's roundhouse. Most of WM"s disused rails were cleared out of Port Covington circa 1990. Parking lots dominated the scene by the 2010s.

Link: old Port Covington photos

Looking back from the other side of those parking lots shows I-95 on the left and the Power Plant's stack in the distance. The rightmost track is the newest.

Link: GE Insulator factory ~1950

That newest track brings industrial-sized rolls of newsprint through the gates and directly into the Baltimore Sun's printing plant.

The closure of WM's swing bridge across the outlet of Gwynns Falls meant there was no longer a way for trains to get in and out of Port Covington. Competitors B&O and WM had never exchanged traffic at the Port, but their affiliation together with C&O via Chessie System created a very-'80s-style détente that permitted construction of the connection seen here. This connection to/from B&O/CSX Riverside Yard snakes under McComas Street (foreground) and I-95 (background).

Here's the connection (curving double track left of center) as seen from Riverside Yard.

The dearth of railcars reveals the rail dismantling process will soon begin. Elevated I-95 spans left to right near photo top, with Hanover Street vertical at left and Cromwell Street as its nearest cross street. Light Street Bridge had extended south from Ferry Bar at the tip of land at lower right. Beginning in the late 1700s, a ferry had shuttled people from here to the other side of the river.

Link: photo source

Long Bridge, new in 1856, reduced travel distance between the city and farms in Anne Arundel County; it would be renamed Light Street Bridge. The South Baltimore and Curtis Bay Railway opened a trolley along the wooden bridge in 1892. Damage from a 1915 fire, as seen here, ended trolley service and intensified calls for a sturdier structure that soon resulted in the Hanover Street Bridge.

Links: photo source, bridge history

This was the scene along Cromwell Street from Hanover Street while WM was still new to Port Covington and access roads were being improved. WM ran out of room for their full name on their grain elevator, so abbreviated "Company" by putting the o inside the C.

Link: photo source

The Riverside Yard rail connection swings in from the right and under Hanover Street to join the "main line". The automobile ramp that led down from this bridge into the WM yard was located off the left edge of this photo and proceeded east.

The 1972 aerial photo at left (courtesy Johns Hopkins University) shows the ramp, which no longer exists, tracing a left-right path at photo-center.

Road photos, like this one where Hanover Street approaches I-95, help readers recognize the location. WM passed under the bridge at the blue van.

This Hanover Street overpass spanned the western neck of the WM yard. At the operational peak, many WM tracks crossed under this bridge, but now only the one in the foreground survives.

With little remaining rail traffic, there has been discussion of removing this overpass and returning to a grade crossing, while a different plan retains the overpass and adds an extension of Baltimore's light rail system underneath it to Port Covington.

Link: Port history

West of Hanover Street, Total Distribution Services Inc., a division of CSX, operated a bulk materials transfer facility. Mass quantities of forest products (wood) were offloaded from trains and transferred onto trucks. Note the railcars at center.

The tracks seen here were left behind by WM.

CSX access into TDSI occurred here from the "main line". To arrive here, rail traffic negotiated a Z shape: east into Riverside Yard (top of the Z), west via the connection (middle of the Z) onto the "main line", then east again (bottom of the Z) through the gate seen in this photo. A nearby disused switch displays a forging year of 1978.

Prior to Chessie System, WM trains arrived here by crossing the Spring Garden Swing Bridge, which is behind the photog. The next page tours it.