Baltimore, Maryland: Train Safety Challenge

Well, it is 2024, and the Train Safety Challenge kiosk may have been retired since [that last tip in] 1999. The museum is a momentous and wonderful space to spend a few hours.

The B&O collection of historical engines and railcars are really something to see. Find the St. Elizabeth locomotive and see if you spot the duck (head) welded to the body for reasons unknown!

A visit to the B&O Railroad Museum is a lot like you'd expect (like an HO model train set with bleachers to sit and watch), and not worth the price of admission. But if you get trapped there by some uncle (the one who wears an engineer's cap to Thanksgiving dinner), make sure you take the "Train Safety Challenge." Located at a touch screen kiosk, it makes the case that other modes of transportation are death-traps. Compared with rail travel, says a happy cartoon engineer giving the 'thumbs up' sign, ten times as many people die in air crashes and three times as many die in bus accidents. There are more fatalities in two days on the nation's highways than in 15 years on the rails. And, if there is an rail mishap, "90% of the time it is the fault of motorists or trespassers."