Rail Yard

In his column last week, Jacques Kelly referred to the 1954 murder of Carolyn Wasilewski, the 14-year-old Morrell Park resident whose battered and partially nude body was found on the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks beneath the old Belvedere Avenue bridge, now Northern Parkway. Today, while File No. 1625 marked "Carolyn Loretta Wasilewski" still sits in the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit, unsolved, little remains of the once semi-rural nature of the crime scene. The spidery two-lane iron bridge was replaced by a four-lane concrete one spanning the Jones Falls Valley.

A Washington-bound Amtrak train was stopped in Cumberland yesterday as federal agents questioned two male passengers said to be of Middle Eastern descent who were acting suspiciously, officials said. The men, who live in the Baltimore-Washington region, were detained for several hours after another passenger noticed one of them with a bulky item under his shirt, said Barry Maddox, a spokesman for the FBI's Baltimore field office. The object - which Maddox would not identify for fear of discouraging reports of suspicious behavior - turned out to be inconsequential.

Maryland will receive an additional $26.3 million in federal stimulus money for transit improvements ranging from buses in rural areas to better speakers at MARC stations, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced Friday. According to the U.S. Transportation Department, the Maryland Transit Administration will receive the following grants: •$17.1 million toward rebuilding the bus loop at the MTA's Mondawmin Transit Center; heating and ventilation upgrades; light rail yard switch upgrades and replacement or overhaul of 24 rail substation circuit breakers.

Daniel Henry Solloway Sr., a retired Baltimore & Ohio Railroad flagman and accomplished woodworker, died of lung disease Jan. 18 at his Pasadena home. He was 82. Born in Baltimore and raised in the city's Brooklyn section, he attended public schools. He worked as an usher at the now-demolished Century Theater and as an ordinary seaman before joining the B&O as a brakeman in 1939. Throughout his 42-year career, he worked as a rail yard foreman and yard master. At the time of his 1981 retirement, he was a passenger train flagman.

Two CSX freight trains -- one passing through Baltimore, the other through Baltimore County -- struck pedestrians within 35 minutes in separate incidents early Sunday, a spokesman for the train line said. The first incident occurred at 3:10 a.m. when a 23-car train transferring from the Curtis Bay rail yard to Bayview struck an unidentified pedestrian near M&T Bank Stadium, according to Robert Sullivan, regional spokesman for CSX. The accident occurred in the 1200 block of Russell St. The injured person was taken to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center.

GREENVILLE, S.C. -- A trainload of 2,400 tons of contaminated soil, rejected by landfills in at least three states, is on its way to Utah for disposal, a Tennessee official said yesterday.Frank Cochran, senior member of the Tennessee Public Service Commission, said in Nashville that officials of CSX Transportation Co. told his office the cars of soil were headed for a Utah landfill after sitting in a Nashville train yard for three days last week.Greenpeace and other environmental groups, whose officials say the soil is contaminated with toxic chemicals, have been looking for the train since it left a CSX rail yard in Sumter, S.C., a week ago.CSX officials would not give location or destination of the train yesterday.

In a move that could add as many as 200 jobs in Maryland, the state Board of Public Works approved yesterday a lease of 45 acres of state land to CSX Transportation, which plans to expand its Jessup automobile-shipping facility.The expansion will let General Motors Corp. join Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Corp. in using the Dorsey Run Road facility, where cars -- shipped by rail from factories -- are loaded onto trucks for shipment to dealers.The state said the rail yard was already the biggest factory-to-dealer distribution facility used by Ford and Chrysler in the mid-Atlantic area.

Federal investigators on Thursday reconstructed the scene of this week's collision between a CSX cargo train and a truck, hoping to piece together more information on the derailment and explosion that rocked businesses and homes in the Rosedale area. Crews with the National Transportation Safety Board plan to stay in Baltimore County for several more days before heading back to their headquarters in Washington to continue their probe of Tuesday's crash, according to board member Robert Sumwalt.

CSX Corp., the largest railroad east of the Mississippi, is closing its engineer school in Cumberland and consolidating its training operations in Atlanta as the company prepares to hire thousands of new workers to meet demand for rail transportation. The loss will fall heaviest on Cumberland's hospitality industry, which benefited by selling rooms and meals to the roughly 300 trainees that filtered through the school annually, economic development officials said. It also will affect nine staff members, consisting of one administrator and eight contract trainers.

Separate shootings wound two, including 15-year-old Police responded to a shooting just after 10 p.m. Saturday in the 400 block of Lyndhurst Street in southwest Baltimore and found a 15-year-old boy with multiple gunshot wounds in the upper body and arms. He was taken to University of Maryland Shock Trauma where he was listed in serious condition. Police also said a man was shot in the head Sunday evening in the 2200 block of Jefferson Street in western Baltimore. The victim was conscious, breathing and talking, police said.