The Chesapeake Beach Railway (CBR), now defunct, was an American railroad of southern Maryland and Washington, D.C., built in the 19th century. The CBR ran 27.629 miles from Washington, D.C., on tracks laid by the Southern Maryland Railroad and its own single track through Maryland farm country to a resort at Chesapeake Beach. The construction of the railway was overseen by Otto Mears, a Colorado railroad builder, who planned a shoreline resort with railroad service from Washington and Baltimore. It served Washington and Chesapeake Beach for almost 35 years, but closed amid the Great Depression and the rise of the automobile. The last train left the station on April 15, 1935. Parts of the right-of-way are now used for roads and a future rail trail.
History
Origins In 1891, Baltimore lawyer (and later Maryland governor) Edwin Warfield and others organized the Washington & Chesapeake Beach Railway to connect Washington, D.C., with 3,000 acres (12 km2) of virgin bay front property at Fishing Creek where they would build a resort. Their Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, resort was to be a vacation spot for the rich and middle class alike, with two grand hotels, a boardwalk, racetrack, and amusements. A pier would accommodate Chesapeake Bay excursion steamers from Baltimore, Annapolis, and Eastern Shore points. In 1894, the W&CBR was granted a charter to incorporate the Town of Chesapeake Beach. Its grand schemes never bore fruit, and the railway was placed in receivership in 1895.
A new company, the Chesapeake Beach Railway Company, took up the idea in 1896. In 1897, Otto Mears was placed in control of the company. He started construction in October 1897 at the B&O Railroad's Alexandria branch north of present-day Deane Avenue between Benning and Kenilworth. On April 7, 1898, the Chesapeake Beach Railway was given the franchise of the W&CBR. Mears optimistically anticipated that the railroad would be completed by July 1898—though before it could open, a draw span bridge would have to be built over the Patuxent River below Bristol to permit steamboat traffic. Plans were approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a contract to construct the bridge was awarded to the Youngstown Bridge Company, and, after numerous delays, the bridge was open by May 1899. Like much of the rail infrastructure throughout the United States, the CBR was built and maintained predominantly by African-American workers. The CBR was segregated by race, with separate waiting rooms and rail cars for African-Americans.
The CBR entered into successful agreements with the B&O to extend service from their Hyattsville station on the Washington Branch and then along the Alexandria Branch for four miles to Chesapeake Junction, located in today's Deanwood neighborhood where current-day Minnesota Avenue NE and Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue NE. On December 5, 1898, the line from Hyattsville to Upper Marlboro was officially opened. Their primary goal was to tap into the Baltimore market by connecting directly with the Baltimore-Washington trains that stopped at Hyattsville. As part of the contract, B&O built a separate siding in front of its Hyattsville station for CB trains to lay over. Most of the time, they ran two round trips a day. By 1899, the line was completed all the way to Chesapeake Beach; the first excursion train ran on July 31, 1899. The hotel was not ready, so normal operations on the eastern leg of the railroad began on June 9, 1900.
In April 1900, the Washington Traction & Electric Company extended the old Columbia H Street car line to Seat Pleasant, connecting with the Chesapeake Beach at the extreme eastern corner of the District. It became the main way Washington passengers reached the beach trains.
When the Benning Road Power Plant was opened in 1906, a three-block section of the railway became a critical part of the freight route for coal heading to the plant. Cars were moved on CBR tracks from the junction with the B&O to a connection with Washington Railway and Electric Company tracks three blocks away.
Operations In the early years, trains left Hyattsville and used B&O tracks to Chesapeake Junction. Then it traveled out of the District on the once-abandoned right-of-way of the Southern Maryland Railroad. It exited D.C. at Seat Pleasant, where it met with the Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railway at a stop called District Line. From there, it went through Upper Marlboro, passing over the PRR (Pope Creek Branch), and then on to Chesapeake Beach.
On July 7, 1913 their agreement to use B&O tracks ended and afterwards all CB passenger trains ended their runs at the Seat Pleasant trolley terminal called "District Line." Chesapeake Junction remained the railroad's primary freight interchange, but the railroad's rural territory produced little freight. The junction grew steadily more important after the building of the Benning power plant in 1906.
Coal destined for the Benning power plant was at first moved into the plant by electric locomotives operating over the tracks of WREC and its successor, Capital Transit. They transferred from the B&O on about three blocks of the CBR tracks from Chesapeake Junction to the connection to the streetcar and then along the streetcar line past Kenilworth Junction to the plant. The plant was the central power facility for the onetime Washington Railway & Electric Company, the largest of the city's two street railway companies. Later it was inherited by Potomac Electric Power Company and progressively expanded over the years as the city's major generating plant. The streetcar company handled all plant switching and interchange with its own electric locomotives. To avoid the necessity for the CB to switch the cars over the three block stretch between B & O and the trolley interchange, CBR made an agreement in 1919 to allow B & O locomotives to use their track, paying CBR a per-car charge. So the whole operation was carried out on the track of three companies using B&O and then streetcar locomotives.
In the early years, the fare for the round trip train ride from District Line station to Chesapeake Beach was 50 cents (approximately ). Express trains took about 60 minutes to make the trip; “locals” took about 90 minutes.
Southern Maryland Railroad section In 1884, the Southern Maryland Railroad (SMR) began constructing a rail line from Deanwood towards the District line which it eventually planned to connect to Brandywine and the rest of its rail line. They laid out the right-of-way and graded the line, laying down ties and rail by 1886. In 1898, the CBR took possession of this section of railway, presumably via a tax auction and used it for its operation. When the SMR emerged from bankruptcy in 1901 as the Washington, Potomac & Chesapeake Railway (WP&CR) it sued the CBR in 1902, claiming they still owned the railbed. The case went to the Supreme Court and in 1905 WP&CR won and took title to the railway. The Chesapeake Beach stopped running on the DC section of the railway, instead stopping at the train station in Seat Pleasant called District Line. Passengers would get there by using the Columbia Railway's street car line from Navy Yard. In 1911, they started leasing the District section of the line and continued until the WP&CR went out of business in 1918. At that point they purchased the section.
End of the line
The railroad was never financially successful and never paid off any interest on its original one million dollar mortgage. Starting in 1921, when the railroad carried a peak of 352,000 passengers, the increased use of automobiles began to cut into revenue. The destruction of the luxurious Belvedere Hotel by a fire which originally started at Klein's Bakery two blocks away on March 30, 1923, further limited business. In 1929, under new management, an attempt to rehabilitate the line was made and operations continued with the hope that a new ferry across the Chesapeake Bay to a point on Trippe's Bay in Dorchester County would drive new business. The ferry was blocked by the Claiborne-Annapolis Ferry Company, a competing ferry out of Annapolis. A hurricane in 1933 irreparably damaged the resort's facilities, and the subsequent loss of business led to foreclosure and a request for abandonment in 1935. On April 15, 1935, after entering receivership, the last train left Chesapeake Beach. All but the 2.631 miles from the roundhouse at "Maryland Park" to the junction at Deanwood, which confusingly took on the name of "Chesapeake Junction" in later years, and the 0.756 mile spur from Chesapeake junction to the PEPCO plant was abandoned, as that section had significant freight business. The remaining section was bought that same year by the East Washington Railway, formed specifically for that purpose, and the rail east of Maryland Park was removed in the summer of 1935 and the best of it sold to plantation railroads in Cuba. Most of the cars were burned and the metal sold for scrap, except for two that were transferred to the East Washington—the Dolores and San Juan—and a mail car. Two of the three remaining engines were transferred to the East Washington as well.
East Washington Railway The 3.4 mile long East Washington Railway survived for 40 years after the Chesapeake Beach Railway stopped running in 1935. Its main customers were a liquor wholesaler, a cement company, a bakery and PEPCO, the local power company. PEPCO needed coal delivered to its Benning Road Plant from Chesapeake Junction, the interchange with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. During the late 1930s and early 1940s operations changed with EWR's two secondhand 4-4-0 locomotives switching the hoppers the three blocks between the B&O and Capital Transit. In 1946 East Washington dieselized, first with a GE 45-ton centercab locomotive, then an ex-U.S. Army 65-ton Whitcomb and finally a former Washington Terminal Alco RS-1. The Seat Pleasant streetcar line was abandoned in 1949, but Capital Transit continued to operate the line to the Benning plant until January 1955 when it sold the section to the East Washington.
When Kenilworth Avenue was converted into a limited-access highway, PEPCO sought permission to build a railroad bridge over it to ensure coal deliveries from the Pennsylvania Railroad, a move Capitol Transit and the East Washington—which delivered coal from the B&O—opposed, but the bridge was built anyway. At the time, the Highway Department wanted Capitol Transit to abandon the line, since the new bridge would provide a more direct service and at great cost to the District and the three rail companies (B&O, Capital Transit and EWR) the rail spur was moved and accommodated.
In 1975 the power plant converted to oil to meet District environmental regulations which resulted in the demise of the East Washington Railway as PEPCO accounted for 97% of their revenue. The last coal train down the PEPCO spur ran on August 18, 1975. In 1978, the railroad, which by then was down to four employees from 10, and a single Whitcomb ceased operations after successfully overcoming a protest of their abandonment by a liquor warehouse owner.