Rail project uncovers a hidden piece of Baltimore’s past

The project team for the $38 million redevelopment of the B&O Railroad Museum (recently rebranded as the National Museum of Railroad History and Innovation) expected challenges when they began the museum’s new CSX Bicentennial Plaza. But they didn’t expect to have construction and designs altered by one of Baltimore’s buried waterways.

“We knew that one of the big challenges in the project would be excavating the dirt to create the plaza,” said Matthew Herbert, Principal with Design Collective. “We knew there was about 20 feet of historic fill — 160-year-old historic fill — on the south side of the property because they had to flatten the area when they built the train yard.”

Then excavation unexpectedly unearthed a piece of Baltimore’s infrastructure.

“It’s part of Baltimore’s proud history of burying rivers and creeks,” Herbert said.

Crews found a brick tunnel encasing a river.

“Since it was built more than a hundred years ago, we were pretty sure the structure had developed a few leaks,” he said. “The leaking water, of course, had found its way to the lowest point which happened to be the B&O basement.”

Team members tracked the leak to the furthest room in the basement — an old stone-and-brick barrel vault that had previously been used as a fallout shelter and was slated to become part of the B&O’s new archives.

“We dug down and found this stone cap. It looked like Roman architecture in South Baltimore,” Herbert said. “When we took the cap off, there were stone bricks beneath forming a channel and there was water actively flowing through it. It was an 1850s foundation drain.”

After consulting with a geotechnical engineer,  the team identified the likely source and path of the buried river. The project team then revised work plans to complete extensive dewatering of the site, modernize systems to funnel water away from the museum and install added drainage systems in the property’s retaining walls.

Images courtesy of Design Collective.