Few of the hundreds of thousands of vacationers today are aware that a railroad once played an important role in the growth of Ocean City, Maryland. The railroad era began in 1876 and lasted for 57 years; it was the primary form of transportation for the resort.
The Baltimore, Chesapeake, and Atlantic Railway entered the town at South Division Street and unloaded its passengers at the old depot on Baltimore Avenue at Somerset Street. In 1903, the depot was moved a block west to Philadelphia Avenue and enlarged. The current day Downtown Transit Bus Station located on this site is a replica of that train depot. In fact, the bricks marking this location are the actual bricks used at the original station on Philadelphia Avenue.
Railroad excursions were popular in the early 1900s and reached their peak in the WWI era when hundreds of passengers from as far away as Baltimore would make a "day-trip" to the beach. Passengers would leave Baltimore by steamship in the early morning and sail down the Chesapeake Bay to the village of Clairbourne in Talbot County. They would then transfer to the train and spend over three hot and smoky hours on the trip to the beach, picking up passengers at several towns across the Eastern Shore. Arriving at the beach around 1 p.m., the excursionists would spend three hours on the beach, swimming
in the ocean, or walking on the Boardwalk until the train would leave around 4 p.m. for the long ride home.
It is likely that most of these visitors would have never seen Ocean City had it not been for the railroad. Many came back with their families in future years to spend a week or more at the town's hotels and boarding houses. The role of the railroad in the growth of Ocean City should never be overlooked or underestimated.
The railroad era ended abruptly on August 23, 1933 when a hurricane destroyed the railroad bridge, the fishing camps, and the tracks leading to the camps. Neither the bridge nor the tracks were ever repaired. The Baltimore, Chesapeake, and Atlantic Railway filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter.
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Railroad excursions were an important source of visitors for Ocean City right from the start. In the town's early days, Thursday was the big excursion day, when thousands of people from across the DelMarVa peninsula would flock to Ocean City for their time at the beach. Western shore residents typically arrived on Sunday for their "day trip."
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