Open Up Bay Weekly
Reading puts ideas in your head.
There are so many places I’ll never visit. So many times, both past and future, out of my reach. So many people so close and far whose lives are stories unto themselves. So many thoughts I’d never imagine.
Except for stories.
Stories are my magic carpet, my time traveling machine, my introduction, my education.
“A novel of the life of the city,” a Chicago Daily News editor called his paper, which in its day could be thick as a middle-size city’s telephone book.
For Chesapeake Country, Bay Weekly is a weekly chapter of our ongoing story, featuring people whose lives run on tracks parallel to your own but each on its own path. They’re your neighbors. But what it is that moves them, how would you ever know — without these pages?
Among them this week are the railway enthusiasts introduced by Bob Melamud in All Aboard.
Chesapeake Country is not railway country. Our trains typically run down memory lane, as in the Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum, the B&O Railway Museum and the B&A Trail, a 13.3-mile rail trail on a former rail line.
I’ve lived in places where the train ran as close to home as it does in the idealized villages created by enthusiasts like Tom Crockett of Tans Cycles Shop in North Beach and the volunteers of Marley Station, who you’ll meet in this story. So I can understand their appreciation for these arteries so near to ours but with beginnings and endings far beyond our reach.
The scope of their affection, however, goes way further than appreciation. Their love is encompassing, expansionary. These are people who build cities and landscapes around their trains, adding more tracks until they’re so big they have to go public.
Or they might move up the line in size, to miniature trains so big that children, and even full-sized adults, can ride them.
Those are the sorts you’ll meet in Melamud’s story, which culminates in instructions for riding the closest we can conveniently get (without paying Amtrak prices) to a real train.
I tested his instructions, and they work. My teenage train-loving grandkids and I rode to Baltimore on the Light Rail. We could have made a shorter trip by car, but as our destination was the National Aquarium, I’d have had to find Inner Harbor parking, so any adventure we might have had would have been less pleasant — and more expensive — than the light rail adventure we had. I recommend it.
You’ll meet still more folks enamored of big vehicles in this week’s paper. Fire trucks come after trains, as staff writer Kathy Knotts follows the annual second Sunday of December Santa Run through many Annapolis-area neighborhoods. Collecting toys for kids in need is the reason for the run, but Santa’s rides by fire truck are much of the fun. Says organizer (and antique fire truck owner) John Muhitch, Santa Run happens because of “little boys who didn’t get a fire truck for Christmas.”
Open up Bay Weekly, and you open up your world.
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]