John von Briesen has railroading in his blood. His father was a B&O Railroad worker. His mother worked in B&O personnel. John’s first job out of high school was with the B&O. The same was true of his brother.
John can talk about railroad adventures as one who worked for the railroad for several years while studying engineering nights at Johns Hopkins. He later, as an engineer, help build and reinforce railway tunnels in West Virginia, was MTA’s project manager for the construction of the original Light Rail line in Baltimore and, as a hobby enthusiast, has repaired tracks on historic short lines in Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Sallye Perrin, have taken vacations in Canada, Mexico and throughout the Northwest on stripped down crew cars used for track maintenance.
At 82, he admits that his spike-driving days likely are behind him. But he lovingly cares for his private train garden in the wide basement of their home on the south side of the 200 block of W. Lanvale St. Pedestrian passersby can peek through sidewalk-level windows and see his elaborate, multi-tiered American Flyer trains clacking through fabricated hills and lowlands. Three levels of tracks carry (and occasionally cause crackups of) a passenger line, freight haulers and a miscellany of specialty miniature cars. There’s even a “tunnel” through a real brick wall that divides part of the basement.
“My dad died when I was 10 months old, so I never knew him. My mom bought me my first train set. I’ve had them ever since,” he said, and he continues to buy and build tracks, cars and little villages. Some of the tiny paper houses were made in Baltimore in the 1950s by local crafts people. Others he fashioned himself. There is a replica of the industrial town of Texas City, TX, from a period when John and his wife lived and worked in Houston.
Baltimore has always been a railroad town, and there are organized clubs of train enthusiasts. John is a loner, although he sometimes visits the nearby B&O Museum. There’s a festival of trains there now with model train layouts, holiday Iights and rides on the Reindeer Railway.
For over a century, in between blazes and cat rescues, some Baltimore-area firefighters have spent their winter downtime arranging elaborate model train sets. Stop by the fire station in Highlandtown this month and alongside the big red trucks you’ll find toy trains tootling through snowdrifts, over bridges, under flying reindeer and past townscapes.
The original link between firefighting and model trains seems lost to history, but the Fire Museum of Maryland in Lutherville (itself home to a train garden) notes that many early Baltimore firefighters came from German families, for whom Christmas decorations included toy villages—and later—toy trains.
In John von Briesen’s basement there is an array of train centric posters and prints and a cabinet full of railroad memorabilia, but back in the distance there’s a big model airplane as well. “I built it to fly,” he said. No lack of irony there. In 1955, when John was just a schoolboy, more people in the United States for the first time traveled by air than by train. Amtrak became the nation’s sole passenger train company when Congress, at the behest of the rail companies, relieved them of passenger service expectations (and financial losses) by creating the National Railroad Passenger Corporation.
–Bill Hamilton
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