With nearly 1,600 photos from the Washington, DC area, you would think this website might have had a Baltimore section by now, since the two cities are only about 40 miles apart and I grew up just outside DC.  In fact, there are more photos on this website from the Washington, DC area than anywhere other than Israel.  Yet until now, there was no Baltimore section on this site. 

There are several reasons for this that I can think of.  The first one is that typically, I’ve gone to Baltimore for Orioles games, and while one can take public transit to get to the ballpark from DC for weeknight games, there is no great public transit option to get back home.  This is also the case on weekends for both directions of travel.  And while traffic on Interstate 95 between the two cities can be abysmal at rush hour, one can get from Baltimore to the close-in DC suburbs in under an hour once the game is over on a weeknight or anytime on a weekend.  In other words, it makes sense to drive.  

Another reason is that aside from the Orioles (remember that DC did not have a baseball team from 1972 until the start of the 2005 season), I never had much of a reason to go to Baltimore.  I suppose I could have made a point of going there to check out the trains and buses, but could also just stay closer to home and explore in Montgomery County, Northern Virginia, or DC itself.  

This isn’t to say I never rode on Baltimore transit until recently.  I took the light rail once in 1999, caught a bus once to get to where the car was parked after a deluge caused an Orioles game I was at to be postponed, and I had been on MARC a handful of times.  However, one must also consider the fact that the Metro Subway did not provide Sunday service until September 2, 2001, and the light rail only operates from 11 AM to 7 PM on Sundays to this day, so in some ways the opportunities to ride these modes was limited by their hours of operation.

Recently, I’ve had more occasions to be in Baltimore, and finally had the chance to explore the Metro Subway in November 2018.  After that, I felt that there were enough photos from the Baltimore area that it finally made sense to post those, as well as any other random Baltimore transit pictures I happened to have from the past (I found some, there might be more hiding in an archive of an old hard drive I have yet to uncover).  

So now there are a total of 50 photos of transit in the Baltimore area, including the core bus service, Metro SubwayLink, and Light RailLink.  Yes, it is only a fraction of what I have in the DC section, and there are cities I’ve spent far less time in that have larger sections on this website, but it seems fitting that considering where I grew up and that I do find myself in Baltimore not infrequently, there is finally a place for its transit photos to be featured on my site.  

A selection of highlights from the Baltimore section can be seen below, or you can see all the photo galleries by clicking here.