All Aboard

Alumnus Harrison Van Waes ’14 finds the biggest attractions as curator for the B&O Railroad Museum. 

Locomotives, cabooses, and all manner of train cars in between may be the biggest attractions at Baltimore’s B&O Railroad Museum, but Harrison Van Waes ’14 also has an eye for the littler ones.

As the museum’s curator, Van Waes manages the B&O’s entire collection, but he specializes in working with many of its 8,000 smaller objects. He designs exhibits, acquires new artifacts, and films documentary, radio and television segments on the history of the railroad. In addition, people often contact him to ask about trinkets he calls “railroadandia,” everything from lanterns to spikes to china that once were a part of the railroad.

“The work is fun because the collection is so diverse,” he says. “Some days I am cataloging buttons, other days I am surveying locomotives that weigh over one million pounds.”

The museum, which opened in 1953, is housed on 40 acres in what once was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s Mount Clare Station and adjacent roundhouse. It’s a mecca for railroad fans, who come from as far as Europe to see the largest collection of 19th- century locomotives in the U.S.

“The museum focuses on a particular industry and a particular company,” Van Waes says. “But because they were the first commercial railroad, their company stories are interwoven with our own American story. Delivering Lincoln to give his first inaugural address. That’s the B&O.”

Ensuring that the public has a world-class museum to learn about it all. That’s Harrison Van Waes.