Howard Street Tunnel

For a quarter-century, Luke Durant Jr. has been Santa Claus at Mondawmin Mall, every year for six weeks during the lead-up to Christmas Day. His white beard is real, his jolliness an intrinsic part of his nature. Many of the people who placed their kids on his knee over the years also patronized his business a few feet away, a candy store called Somethin' Good, where popcorn, honey cashews, lollipops and candied apples sold in abundance. The store has been a fixture of the mall for 35 years - longer than Durant's been Santa.

The Maryland Transportation Authority is reviewing a request from CSX Transportation Corp. to lease about five acres under Interstate 95 to be used for construction of the train and truck depot that will serve the Port of Baltimore. The land would allow CSX to expand the footprint of the 70-acre site near the Morrell Park neighborhood in Southwest Baltimore for its $90 million facility to transfer cargo containers from trains to trucks and vice versa. The state has promised to pay one-third of the cost.

The clouds of acrid black smoke that spewed from yesterday's tunnel fire made virtual prisoners of thousands of commuters and Orioles fans who were stuck downtown for hours in gridlocked traffic or in steamy bars and restaurants that had been forced to shut off their air conditioning. Yesterday's fire, caused by a CSX freight train accident, reached its height during the evening rush hour, as workers started heading home and others were headed into town to catch the second game of the Orioles-Texas Rangers doubleheader.

The 1.7-mile Howard Street Tunnel that billowed smoke yesterday is not a prominent part of the Baltimore landscape, not a source of great civic pride. Yet the tunnel, mostly ignored and unseen - even unknown to many residents - is hugely important, the way rail freight basically gets from here to there along the East Coast. And it's hardly just a functional workhorse. The 106-year-old tunnel is distinctive in many ways. It's said to be the longest underground conduit of freight on the Atlantic seaboard; the first example of heavy-duty railroad electrification in the United States, possibly the world; and a model example of soft-earth construction, built at a time when steam locomotives huffed and puffed through mostly rock-blasted tunnels.

In teams of three, firefighters wearing blue oxygen tanks prepared to go into the tunnel, following a path of light from a nearby truck's headlights. They put on black face masks as an extra precaution against possibly poisonous fumes. "We're gearing up, and bottling up," one shouted to the others. Minutes later, just before 10 p.m., they turned off the hose that had been pouring a steady stream of water into the south end of the railroad tunnel and started to head in. Asked if he was worried, one of the firefighters shrugged and said, "It's part of the job."

The state, city and CSX Transportation have tentatively selected the Mount Clare train yard in Southwest Baltimore for a roughly $90 million facility where containerized cargo would be transferred from trucks to trains, a project designed to improve the Port of Baltimore's efficiency. The project would help the port and CSX by allowing the railroad to bypass the more than century-old Howard Street Tunnel, which is too low for passage of trains with containers stacked two high. Such double-stacking of truck-sized shipping containers is the most cost-effective way to move them by rail.

A freight train smacked into a truck carrying garbage and careened off the tracks in Rosedale Tuesday afternoon, triggering an explosion felt throughout the region and sending up a plume of black smoke visible for miles. Authorities identified the driver of the truck as John Alban Jr., a retired Baltimore County firefighter who owns a waste collection company near the scene of the crash. The Essex man was listed in serious condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center Tuesday night, a hospital spokeswoman said.

This time we got lucky. This time, when train cars carrying hazardous materials went off the tracks in the Howard Street tunnel Thursday morning, there was no leak — unlike the similar accident in 2001, when cars leaked materials including fluorosilicic acid. Back in 2001, CSX said it was not responsible for the Howard Street tunnel accident. The railroad blamed the city, saying a water main leak caused the derailment and the subsequent fire that burned in the tunnel for days.

WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives voted yesterday to require railroads to inform local authorities of the hazardous materials they carry through tunnels and to give them information about entrances and exits in case of emergency. Part of the Federal Railroad Safety Improvement Act of 2007, the requirements were written by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings in response to a 2001 fire caused by the derailment of a train carrying flammable liquid through a Baltimore tunnel. "The Howard Street Tunnel fire was a catastrophic eye-opener to the need for a safety overhaul of our nation's railway systems, particularly where tunnels and bridges are concerned," said the Baltimore Democrat, a member of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

JUST WHEN I thought I'd heard all my family's stories, my father came up with a fresh anecdote. He told of how he earned Christmas money working for the old Railway Express Agency at Camden Station during the Great Depression of the 1930s. His post was on a freight platform adjacent to the then southern opening of the Howard Street Tunnel, where fast trains stopped to receive passengers and goods - a spot near today's Convention Center and, of course, Camden Station itself. It was Joe Kelly's job to load and unload express freight over a holiday season.