Passengers

Among the knives, real and toy pistols, and other dangerous weapons seized at BWI Marshall Airport, this one stood out: A curving 7-inch arc of jagged teeth with a brass knuckle-style grip. A blogger for the Transportation Security Administration coined the nickname "debrainer" as he enshrined the nasty-looking utensil in the TSA's informal hall of fame. That's the weirdest thing officers said they have confiscated in recent months from carry-on baggage at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, used by more than 22.2 million passengers last year.

A single car crash in Gambrills Monday has claimed the life of an elderly female passenger and critically injured the driver. The car was traveling down the driveway to an underground parking garage at about 4:50 p.m., when it struck a wall of the building in the 2600 block of Chapel Lake Drive, police said. Both victims, who, police said, are related, were taken to University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where the woman died. The elderly driver remains in critical condition.

Longer and more comfortable, and able to make flights to the Caribbean, Mexico and Hawaii, the first of Southwest Airlines' new Boeing 737-800 jets is set to arrive in Baltimore next week. The new cabins are the company's first redesign in a decade, with seating tested by people with 20 different body types — from the very short to the very tall. Robert Jordan, the airline's chief commercial officer, said the jets herald "the Southwest of the future. " Southwest will take delivery of 33 of the 800-series planes, which cost about $84.4 million each, this year and 41 next year.

Last summer, when the paving trucks showed up, fans of the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad deservedly got a little nervous. The object of their veneration is a sliver of railroad track that bisects North Charles Street in the Woodbrook neighborhood of Baltimore County. Thousands of drivers who pass over the track every day probably have no idea what it was and where it went. It is left over from the days when the Ma & Pa zigzagged for 77.2 miles across the Maryland countryside from Baltimore to York, Pa. That track, which was left unpaved, is where a head-on collision shattered the tranquillity of a late-spring Saturday afternoon.

Several columns ago, I wrote about the 160th anniversary of the foundering of the HMS Birkenhead off the West African coast that established the maritime tradition of "women and children first" when it comes time to evacuate a stricken vessel. My good friend, Helen Delich Bentley, the former congresswoman and former federal maritime commissioner, wrote in a letter to the editor of The Baltimore Sun that I had overlooked one of the most dramatic Atlantic sea rescues of all time, when the Missouri, out of Baltimore, rescued all passengers and crew from the steamer Danmark in 1889.

The Italian liner Costa Concordia, with 4,200 passengers aboard, piled up in January on the rocky shoreline of Tuscany, tearing out its bottom and capsizing. The death toll has risen to 25, with the recovery of eight more bodies last week. Seven people remain missing. Capt. Francesco Schettino, the Costa Concordia's master, violated one of the noblest and most sacred traditions of the sea when he did not direct the evacuation of passengers and crew. There can be nothing more terrifying for passengers than to see crew members going over the side, as has been alleged by disaster survivors, who described a scene of panic and confusion.

For the second year in a row, passenger traffic set records at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, with 22.39 million ticket holders passing through the gates in 2011. The 2.1 percent increase came as airport officials launched a $100 million renovation designed to streamline security check-ins, eliminate a major passenger bottleneck and give Southwest Airlines, the airport's No. 1 carrier, room to grow. BWI handled 2.2 million passengers in July, a record, while cargo shipments in 2011 grew by 5.3 percent to 237.6 million pounds, state officials said Wednesday.

Before year's end, Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport will be part of a passenger prescreening program that allows low-risk travelers to keep their belts and shoes on and their laptops in their bags as they go through security checkpoints. But the airport's largest carrier — Southwest — will not participate, as it concentrates instead on its $1 billion merger with AirTran and the consolidation of their ticketing systems. Southwest and AirTran account for roughly 70 percent of BWI's traffic.

The Maryland Transit Administration has told the General Assembly that it would have to raise Baltimore-area transit fares by 65 cents next fiscal year — a 40 percent jump — in order to meet state revenue goals without cutting service. Such an increase would have to be followed by another 25-cent increase two years later to meet "farebox recovery" targets. Maryland law requires that transit systems cover 35 percent of their costs through passenger payments, though that goal is missed more often than it is met. The report doesn't necessarily mean fares will go up by that amount, but it sets a baseline for discussions of an increase — which critics argue would disproportionately affect many of the Baltimore area's poorest residents.

Thomas Schreiber, a career railroader who had worked in freight and passenger service, died Monday of pneumonia at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson. The longtime Sparks resident was 67. Mr. Schreiber, a third-generation railroader whose father and grandfather worked for the old Pennsylvania Railroad, was born in Altoona, Pa., and later moved with his family to Gray Manor, a southeastern Baltimore County community. When he was 15, his family moved to Sparks, and Mr. Schreiber graduated in 1962 from Hereford High School.