Rail Cars

Two days after six small underground explosions rocked downtown Baltimore, authorities remained stumped yesterday as to how 1,000 gallons of a highly flammable chemical pooled beneath a major intersection without notice before blowing up. City, state and CSX Corp. officials used words such as "baffling," "puzzling" and "a mystery" as they pondered how tripropylene - commonly used by industry - ignited Saturday under Pratt and Light streets and blew a 300-pound manhole cover 4 feet into the air. Investigators continued to theorize that the tripropylene entered the storm drain after leaking from a tanker car during last month's freight train derailment and fire in the Howard Street Tunnel, four blocks west of the intersection.

The railroad tunnel fire that disrupted downtown Baltimore for three days eased its grip yesterday as firefighters pulled out almost all of the charred rail cars trapped underground, including three derailed hazardous chemical tankers that had posed the greatest risk to the city. The clearest sign of a return to normality came at 7:05 last night, when the Orioles took the field at Camden Yards after three straight nights of canceled ballgames. By coincidence, the team had scheduled the game months ago to be "Firefighter Appreciation Day."

RailWorks Corp., a Mount Washington-based transportation service company, said yesterday that it is backing out of a plan announced earlier in the month to buy AAI Corp.'s transportation division. John G. Larkin, RailWorks chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement that "the termination of discussions with AAI Corporation would serve the best interest of RailWorks Corporation and its shareholders." No one at RailWorks, Cockeysville-based AAI, or AAI's parent company, United Industrial Corp.

AAI Corp. in Cockeysville, once one of Maryland's fastest-growing defense companies, announced yesterday that it reached an agreement to sell a transportation division, a move that could clear the way for sale of the entire company. No sale price was disclosed in the definitive agreement between United Industrial Corp., AAI's New York-based parent, and RailWorks Corp., a transportation service company with headquarters in Mount Washington. Under terms of the agreement, RailWorks will lease two buildings at AAI's 60-acre campus off York Road where workers construct rail car components, and do overhaul work for Maryland's Mass Transit Administration and transit systems in other parts of the country.

A museum on wheels has brought four days of fine art to Taneytown, on a stretch of railway that normally runs raw stone and cement through this city of 5,000.Artrain opened yesterday and will stay through Sunday before rolling on to Bethlehem, Pa. While it is in Taneytown, about 3,500 people are expected to walk through converted rail cars that hold about 60 artworks by major U.S. artists, such as an original silk-screen by Andy Warhol, and paintings by Norman Rockwell and James Browning Wyeth.

BARBARA SCHNELL of Hampstead and Suzanne Mancha of Manchester will be featured in the railway car artist's studio, part of the national Artrain museum.The Artrain will be open at the Maryland Midland Railway tracks in Taneytown from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. tomorrow through Sunday. The studio will be open from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.Schnell, a children's art educator, will paint a pastel portrait of Taneytown Mayor Henry C. Heine tomorrow morning, and return for another portrait Friday.

AAI Corp. of Hunt Valley began work this week on a $71 million contract to overhaul commuter rail cars for the state of New Jersey, a major award for the company that will bring in 145 new jobs.AAI beat Amtrak and Bombardier Inc. of Canada in the competition, serving notice that AAI intends to be a player in rail car overhaul."This is a very, very large win for us," said Jack Bell, the company's senior vice president for transportation systems. "There's no question this is a major steppingstone to our stated objective of being the leader in the U.S. for the overhaul of rail passenger cars."

A trainload of art depicting the exploration of space, including works from the Smithsonian Institution, is scheduled to roll into Taneytown in September 1999.City officials are preparing to sign a contract to sponsor four-day visit from Artrain, a Michigan-based nonprofit art museum housed in five railroad cars.The train has visited 550 communities in 42 states and Washington in 28 years of operation. Many of its stops are in rural areas where residents do not have access to art museums.

Transit officials breathed a sigh of relief when Mass Transit Administration light rail cars moved gingerly across a rain-slicked elevated trestle's twisting curve yesterday in a crucial test of a new spur connecting the trolley with Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station.Motormen tested cars all day down a one-third-mile section of track that spans the Jones Falls Expressway, descends into the Jones Falls Valley and runs under the Maryland Avenue bridge before coming to a stop at Penn Station's Platform One."

A unit of CSX Corp. said yesterday that a jury had ordered it to pay $2.5 billion in punitive damages stemming from a railroad-car fire in New Orleans 10 years ago.But A. R. "Pete" Carpenter, the president and chief executive of the unit, CSX Transportation, said that the decision by the jury was "clearly inconsistent with the facts" and that the company would appeal.The case involved an incident that began Sept. 9, 1987, when a tank car containing butadiene, a volatile compound used in making synthetic rubber, began to leak and then burst into flames at an interchange rail yard, on tracks that belonged to CSX Transportation.