Train Station

Head down, eyes focused, Alexis Brown sat on a bench at Penn Station yesterday, typing fast on a laptop. "I'm writing a paper that's due in an hour," said Brown, a second-year law student at the University of Baltimore, her tone slightly anxious. She'd been too busy to notice, she said, that the train station was newly equipped as a Wi-Fi "hot spot," a system that would enable her, if she chose, to send her paper directly to her professor via e-mail. The Wi-Fi setup was established Monday at Penn Station and at four other Amtrak terminals on the Northeast corridor - Philadelphia's 30th Street Station, Wilmington Station in Delaware, Washington's Union Station and Penn Station in Manhattan.

The new brick building on the eastern edge of downtown Baltimore looks curiously like a train station, with its arched windows and overhanging roofline. But trains will never stop there. It's home to the Our Daily Bread Employment Center, and it was designed as the starting point for a different sort of journey. Scheduled to begin full operation June 4 after a dedication Thursday, the $15 million building at 725 Fallsway represents an unprecedented attempt by Catholic Charities of Baltimore to fight hunger, unemployment and homelessness.

The little red building is dwarfed by the looming hotels and restaurants filling Inner Harbor East. Once home to the little-known Baltimore Civil War Museum, the former President Street train station will soon be on the auction block. Owned by the city, the Baltimore Development Corp. will put out a request for proposals to buy or lease the building this spring, said Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon. Supporters of the museum say they fear that it will be gobbled up by the same development forces that have transformed much of this waterfront community.

The Hampstead Train Station Committee, a nonprofit corporation striving to renovate the decaying building as a museum and business center, is negotiating to buy the structure from the town to make it easier to obtain private and public grants.Representatives from the committee's board of directors will soon negotiate with Hampstead Town Manager Ken Decker on the terms of the sale, subject to the Town Council's approval, said Councilman Wayne H. Thomas, who is leading the effort. The station project would aid town officials' plans to revitalize the downtown business district.

Amtrak, in its most aggressive move to lure commuters off the highways and out of the skies, unveiled yesterday its first high-speed rail system, trains with plush seats, work stations and bistros that will glide at 150 mph from Washington to New York and Boston.Long-planned and viewed skeptically by critics, the service is scheduled to begin in October, Amtrak officials said at a news conference in New York.The trains will knock 2 1/2 hours off trips from Baltimore to Boston, cutting travel time from eight hours to 5 1/2 hours.

Real estate agents know it's common for people to fall in love with houses and instantly want to live in them, and the town of Sykesville tends to have that effect on people."

BALTIMORE will have a $14.5 million Greyhound Lines bus terminal and garage next to Penn Station by mid-2002, if financing and design arrangements can be firmed up this fall.The city's Design Advisory Panel approved preliminary plans last week that call for the bus terminal to be constructed on a triangle of land north of the train station at Charles and Lanvale streets.The bus terminal would occupy the first level of a five-story building and be linked to the train station by a pedestrian sky bridge.

A three-alarm fire destroyed a historic wood and stone building early yesterday that formerly was the Greenmount train station, post office, general store and granary off Route 30.The building, used as an antiques and crafts shop between 1983 and 1993, has been vacant since then. Greenmount is just north of Hampstead.State fire marshals said the fire broke out on the east, or railroad track side, of the building and spread throughout the post-and-beam structure.The cause of the fire has not been determined, said K. Arthur McGhee, deputy state fire marshal, who estimated the age of the two-story building at about 125 years.

MOSCOW -- Out by train. Of all the ways to leave Russia, it may be the finest. Not giddily luxurious. Not an adventure. Certainly not fast. But a perfect blend of time and Russian-ness.The airport is a nightmare, and upon boarding a plane you're instantly in the land of Boeing. Highways are unthinkable. There's the sea, perhaps, but that's for another time.No. Let us begin at Moscow's Leningradsky Station, and the 18 dull-green cars of the Lev Tolstoy train to Helsinki, Finland, stretching down the platform and into the night.

(The following first-person account of the scene in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, since the latest wave of ethnic cleansing began there was written by a young Kosovo Albanian woman who has been working there as a free-lance journalist.)SKOPJE, Macedonia -- Even after 10 days of NATO air attacks, I didn't think it would happen. Even after the trains began running to Macedonia (the line to Skopje hadn't run for ages), I didn't think it would come to this.But suddenly, after Dragodan, an Albanian district of Pristina, was cleared, it started.

After years of planning and false starts, Amtrak has reached agreement with a developer to turn the upper three levels of Baltimore's historic Pennsylvania Station into a 77-room hotel, a first for an Amtrak-owned station along the northeast corridor. Amtrak officials confirmed this week that they have signed a lease with Hospitality Partners of Bethesda that will enable the company to build and run a "boutique" hotel inside the 1911 train station while it continues to operate as a railroad terminal.

After several years of delay, Maryland's latest attempt to foster urban-style, mixed-use development at state mass transit rail stations is moving forward in Savage, where a $175 million combination of apartments, offices, shops and restaurants is envisioned for what is now a 13-acre parking lot. "Our market are folks connected to NSA [National Security Agency] and BRAC, the federal Base Realignment and Closing process," said Terry Richardson, a founding partner and executive vice president of Petrie Ross Joint Ventures, the developer that built the Parole Town Center in Anne Arundel County.

With just one day to go before President-elect Barack Obama and roughly 150,000 onlookers converge on Baltimore, planners are scrambling to make sure the city and the site in front of City Hall are ready. Yesterday, the U.S. Secret Service approved a street closure plan, Mayor Sheila Dixon asked residents to neaten their yards, Gov. Martin O'Malley urged people to take public transportation into the city, and the Maryland Transit Administration announced changes to 18 bus routes (details online at www.mtamaryland.

Hospital patient injured in jump from bridge A patient who walked out of Maryland General Hospital last evening suffered multiple injuries a short time later when he jumped from the Howard Street bridge, said a city Fire Department spokesman. The patient's name was not released. About 6:30 p.m, police and the crews of two ambulances responded to the bridge and to Falls Road under the bridge moments after the man jumped at least 60 feet and landed in heavy brush near the Jones Falls, said Chief Kevin Cartwright.

You can't buy a ticket anymore, but the ticket window from the former Riderwood train station remains in place in the brick building that was transformed from whistle-stop to single-family home decades ago. The station was built around 1904 by the Northern Central Railroad, after the first station, which was a shed with a one-room station-and-general store, burned down. Passenger service on the two-car Parkton Local between Baltimore and Parkton was dropped in 1959 for lack of riders, and an NCR employee and his wife became the Riderwood station's first private owner residents a few years later.

Last year, Dr. Gavin Hamilton lived on the 17th floor of a new building in Baltimore's trendy Harbor East community. This year, the 32-year-old specialist in internal medicine found an apartment he likes even more -- a converted loft in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. He's so pleased with it, he's throwing an Oscar party to show it off to his friends. "I like the layout and the high ceilings and the way they preserved the industrial feel of the building," he said. Plus, "it's on the route of the Hopkins shuttle and an easy walk to the train station and Tapas Teatro and the Charles Theatre.

President Street Station in Baltimore is the oldest surviving big city railroad terminal in the United States. The property was a stop on the Underground Railroad used by slaves fleeing from the South. The building played a key role in the first fatalities of the Civil War. It's also sitting vacant in an area of intense commercial development on Baltimore's waterfront. So when members of Baltimore's preservation commission learned that Mayor Sheila Dixon plans to seek proposals from groups interested in redeveloping the city-owned property at 601 President St., they decided to take steps to protect the former train station from disappearing altogether.

The glass and steel of the Harbor East skyline dwarf the rundown brick station. Its size, relative to the gleaming office towers and pricey condominiums, by no means reflects its stature or significance, which lie in its history. And that history should be at the center of any effort to rescue the President Street station from indifference and decay. It looks so out of place on its oddly shaped plot of land, sandwiched on the eastern side of the harbor between the restaurants of Little Italy, the Public Works Museum, a trendy Irish pub and the Marriott Waterfront Hotel.

The little red building is dwarfed by the looming hotels and restaurants filling Inner Harbor East. Once home to the little-known Baltimore Civil War Museum, the former President Street train station will soon be on the auction block. Owned by the city, the Baltimore Development Corp. will put out a request for proposals to buy or lease the building this spring, said Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon. Supporters of the museum say they fear that it will be gobbled up by the same development forces that have transformed much of this waterfront community.

Shorty Miller paced in a cold drizzle yesterday morning, watching workers hoist tall cranes and wrap thick straps around the yellow caboose. About 9 o'clock, as a man in a hard hat raised his arms like an orchestra conductor, the caboose rose into the air. Miller, his white hair damp with rain, offered suggestions to the workers as the caboose dangled over the flatbed truck that would carry it away. Then in a quiet voice he said, "Well, I seen 'em come, and I seen 'em go." More than 20 years ago, Jacob Miller, who is known as "Shorty," bought five older cabooses as a gift for the people of Lansdowne and a tribute to the area's railroad history.