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Chesapeake Vacation - Oct. 2013

Day 3, Oct. 12, 2013

Today we went to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum. We both enjoyed it very much. That's saying something if Connie could enjoy a railroad museum. We wished that we had our grandsons with us as they are railroad buffs.

The museum houses one of only two surviving "Allegheny" class locomotives (the other is in the Henry Ford Museum). This is the heaviest, most powerful rail locomotive ever built. It is a behemoth!

These two 4-6-2 Pacific type locomotives (below) from Baldwin Locomotive Works are on display side by side. The C&O 490 (right) started life looking like the B&O and later had the streamlining added.

B&O 5300 C&O 490

We took a short ride on a train. It was powered by a small switching locomotive (we learned that they only run the steam locomotive a couple of Saturdays in the month so we lucked out to get to see it in action.)

Here is the locomotive that pulled the train:

Being a switching locomotive it is self contained - that is the water and coal are carried on the engine. The water is in a tank that wraps over the top of the boiler and the coal in a small bin on the rear of the engine.

This looks serious - but my grandsons are envious

After the train museum we drove over to the Baltimore Museum of Art on the John Hopkins campus. The museum boasts the largest collection of Henri Matisse works. Connie and I agree that it's nothing to boast about. It is largely a bunch of crude sketches of his daughter's face. OK Henri, I think you have that down, now how about trying something a little different.

The museum does house a wonderful collection of 28 mosaics discovered in the affluent suburb of Daphne and the nearby port city of Seleucia Pieria, the mosaics date from the days of the emperor Hadrian
in the 2nd century A.D. to the Christian empire of Justinian in the 6th century. They are stunning.

Also a fairly large collection of Renaissance paintings and sculpture. All of these works make the modern art all the more laughable.


We learned just the day before that the Baltimore Marathon was going to be held on Saturday, so we were glad we had chosen to tour downtown on Friday. However we did run into some traffic as we drove from the B&O Museum over to the art museum. But trying to tour downtown on Saturday would have been a mess.
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