Rail Yard

She won fans while helping to turn a rail yard into a ballpark. Now, Janet Marie Smith is returning to work in Baltimore and will look to transform some of the city's other industrial remnants. On Monday, Smith, president of Turner Sports & Entertainment Development Inc. in Atlanta, will join Baltimore developer Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse Inc. in an as-yet untitled position. The company's president, C. William Struever, said he envisions his new hire working on several urban renewal projects.

The people managing Baltimore's marine terminals and rail yards feel a headache coming on, and union boss James P. Hoffa is making it happen.The newly elected president of the Teamsters is negotiating his first national contract -- for 12,000 workers in the car-hauling business. He says the negotiations will prove that "the Teamsters are back," and is promising to "shut this industry down" if talks don't go his way.But in Baltimore, the car-hauling industry is a staple of domestic and international commerce.

Two Metro workers were struck and killed early Tuesday by a large truck that was backing down the track just north of the Rockville station, officials said, deepening a crisis that has afflicted the transit agency for much of the past year. The fatal crash is the latest in a series of accidents that have led members of Congress to question the safety of Metro operations and prompted the Obama administration to call for federal control of safety regulation of subways and light rail systems.

Light rail riders have been getting to know each other a little more intimately over the past week as increased safety inspections have forced officials to run one-car, standing-room-only trains at rush hour and other times. Jawauna Greene, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Transit Administration, said yesterday that the agency has had to step up its inspections of its 53 light rail cars after a wheel on one cracked about a month ago. The MTA sent out an advisory late yesterday warning customers of possible delays and crowding as the light rail system operates with fewer cars than usual.

When the Orioles and the Maryland Stadium Authority set out to create an old-fashioned ballpark in Camden Yards, they didn't have to invent history.It was there all along in the form of the B&O Railroad warehouse, the massive, brooding hulk of a building that dates from the era when Baltimore's western edge was a bustling rail yard -- and Babe Ruth's father had a saloon right down the street.Looming behind right field, just 460 feet from home plate, the long-as-a-train warehouse rivals Fenway Park's Green Monster as one of the most distinctive features in baseball.

Harry N. Hagy Sr., a retired Chessie System yard foreman who enjoyed helping his neighbors, died of heart failure Feb. 27 at his Mount Washington home. He was 77. Mr. Hagy was born in Baltimore and raised in Reading, Pa., where he graduated from high school. He served in the Navy during World War II. He began working for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1950. He held supervisory positions at the Mount Clare, Locust Point, Bayview and Curtis Bay rail yards, and retired in 1989. "During his entire 39-year career, he only missed one day of work, and that's because he had the flu," said his wife of 57 years, the former Dorothy Lugenbeel.

PORTLAND, Ore. - Just blocks from this city's center, a brand-new urban neighborhood is rising from bare ground once covered by Burlington Northern rail yards. The 34-acre Hoyt Street Yards development, still just a promise of what's to come, has sold out all five of its existing residential buildings, which have more than 500 units. Although much of the new River District, bordered to the north by the Willamette River, is still dirt, those who have bought there see a neighborhood in which the potential is obvious.

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 collision at a rail yard early Sunday injured three workers on Washington's Metro. The transit agency says a six-car subway train was returning to the West Falls Church Rail Yard when it rear-ended a parked six-car train. Two workers were cleaning the parked train to get it ready for service. Three employees were treated for minor injuries at a nearby hospital and released. No passengers were on board when the crash occurred at about 4:30 a.m. It was the latest in a series of recent accidents involving Washington's rail system.