Ellicott City Station - Ellicott City, Maryland
N 39° 16.051 W 076° 47.708
18S E 345138 N 4347999
Ellicott City Station, built in 1830, is the oldest existing passenger train station in the United States.
Waymark Code: WM5NFC
Location: Maryland, United States
Date Posted: 01/25/2009
Views: 17
Ellicott City Station was built in the years 1829 to 1830 as the western terminus of the first commercial railroad in the United States, the 13-mile Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. This is also the only station known to be designed to accommodate the maintenance of steam locomotives.
Today the Ellicott City Station no longer serves trains, instead it is a railroad museum administered by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum - (
visit link) The Wikipedia entry for Ellicott City Station - (
visit link) An excellent write-up about the station can be found at the web site of the Maryland Historical Trust - (
visit link)
From the historical marker outside of the station – Roads versus Rails, The Rivalry Begins
Ellicott City’s Main Street is the National Pike, part of the road system that moved Americans west. Only two decades after the road was constructed, a new transportation rival appeared. In 1831, America’s first railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio, introduced steam engines to the Patapsco River Valley. The rivalry between the road and the railroad came together here.
Noisy, dirty, and at first, unreliable, the railroad soon gained the upper hand. By 1840, a stage coach trip to Cumberland on the National Pike cost $9 and took twenty hours. The same trip on the B&O cost $7 and took ten. John H.B. Latrobe summed it up best when he wrote, “That solitary horseman who comes down [the National Road] at a trot that dislocates half the bones in his body, and sends his saddle bags with grievous flapping is one of the few who still prefers its glow and dust to the shade and velocity of travel on the iron avenue to the west.” While it was so important for the first decades of the 1800s, the National Road was doomed.