Railroads

Eric Lee Wolf, a colorful and lighthearted MARC conductor who was an institution on Camden Line trains where he entertained passengers with various jokes and windup toys, died May 3 of a massive heart attack at Washington's Union Station. The Arbutus resident was 57. Mr. Wolf's commuter train, No. 849, the 7:20 a.m. from Camden Station, had just arrived at Union Station. "Eric was in the process of opening the doors up when he was stricken," said David Johnson, who is chief customer communications officer for MARC.

Amtrak is turning out to be a good neighbor after all. The railroad announced plans Friday to install a good fence, not the shoddy chain-link joke in place now, along its Northeast Corridor tracks in Middle River. It was along that 2-mile stretch, where ultra-quiet trains race by at speeds up to 125 mph, that 14-year-old Anna Marie Stickel was killed in January 2010 as she walked along the tracks and was hit from behind. Certainly Anna didn't belong there. She was a trespasser.

Maia Woods had long wondered about the strange-looking house on Rolling Road in Rockdale, the one that sits off Liberty Road, boarded up and neglected. On Saturday, she found out about its years as a station on the Underground Railroad, how it's been moved twice in its 200-plus-year history by family members well aware of its historical importance, and how it was bought by a couple 30 years ago determined to see it preserved — even though it's been so contaminated by pesticides that no one will ever be able to live in it again.

Oliver F. "Ollie" Lowman Jr., a retired railroader and World War II veteran, died March 15 of multiple organ failure at Carroll Hospital Center. The Finksburg resident was 84. The son of a Baltimore police officer and a homemaker, Mr. Lowman was born and raised in Baltimore. Mr. Lowman dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Navy in 1943. He served in the Atlantic as a gunner aboard the light cruisers USS Philadelphia and USS Providence and the freighter SS Rhode Island.

For or the life of me I can't understand why after 60 years Holocaust victims are blaming a French railroad for being involved in the Holocaust tragedies. ("Rail line's role in Holocaust surfaces in MARC contract bid," Feb. 19). They didn't round up the thousands of Jews and put them in cattle cars to the camps. The Germans did. Don't you think that if this French railroad company didn't exist the Germans would have found another way to transport the people? Look at how many people alive today that lived through the Holocaust and other war tragedies are driving Mercedes, Volkswagens, Toyotas, etc. Did these companies apologize for their war crimes?

Robert B. Cunningham, a retired railroader and World War II Navy veteran, died Saturday of complications from a stroke at Gilchrist Hospice Care. The Perry Hall resident was 92. Mr. Cunningham, whose father was a World War I veteran and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 and whose mother was a buyer for the old O'Neill's department store, was born in Baltimore. He was raised in a home across from Clifton Park, where he caddied for 75 cents a game and taught himself to play by copying the best players, family members said.

For all the controversial efforts to bring high-speed passenger rail to places like California and South Florida, the ideal location for such a major investment is in Baltimore's backyard. That was recently confirmed by an independent study that found the Northeast corridor would return the most bang for the high-speed rail buck of anywhere in the country. The report released this month by America 2050, a coalition of transportation planners and policymakers financed by a handful of charitable foundations, found high-speed rail works best in corridors of 100-600 miles connecting major employment centers, the shorter and more densely populated the better.

An old friend, Linda F. Lapides, called the other day to let me know about another astonishing find she recently added to her highly acclaimed collection of 18th- and 19th-century texts that were published in Baltimore for juvenile readers. "The United States Reader or Juvenile Instructor No. 2," written by William Darby and published in Baltimore in 1829, is so interesting because within its pages is a very early account, albeit brief, about the new Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Chartered in 1827, the B&O was the nation's first common carrier railroad, and at the time Darby's book was published, the railroad was building its line westward from the city to Ellicott's Mills, today's Ellicott City.