Pope's Creek Subdivision
The Baltimore and Potomac Railroad (B&P) was chartered on May 6th, 1853 with the purpose of building a railroad from Baltimore to Upper Marlboro, Maryland then to a point on the Potomac River near Port Tobacco, Maryland with permission to build branches off the line not exceeding 20 miles in length.
The PRR saw the existing Baltimore and Potomac charter's clause allowing branches to be built within 20 miles (32 km) of Washington as an opportunity to get around that.
[4]: 335 As a result in 1866 the B&P sought permission to build a branch into Washington from a point within 2 miles of the Collington (now Bowie) Post Office in Prince George's County and also signed a contract to begin construction of the main line between Baltimore and the Potomac.
John E. Whitter, who was in charge of construction, but the road needed to be ballasted before opening and was not ready when the line between Baltimore and Washington started passenger service on July 2, 1872.
[20][21] The line to Pope's Creek was finished in late December, formally opened on January 1, 1873 and the first trains were run the next day.
[26] In 1899 the Chesapeake Beach Railway, which had reached Upper Marlboro from Washington, DC the year before, was built over the Pope's Creek Branch.
[28] An excursion train road the line to Pope's Creek in 1955, possibly the last passenger train on the line that far south;[29] but in 1966, Democratic Congressional candidate Harry A. Boswell, Jr. rented a locomotive and rail car for a campaign ride that went to Brandywine - because of the weight of the car and the condition of the rail the PRR wouldn't let him go any farther south.
In 1943 the freight operation was still moving feed and farm supplies, coal, beer from Baltimore and pulpwood and payphone coins from Southern Maryland.
[25] The SMECO power plant at Pope's Creek, which it had supplied with coal, went out of service in 1953 and the Navy stopped running trains to Patuxent River the next year.
While the name of the line to Chalk Point is a not well documented, one source attributes it to John C. Herbert, who was a Vice-President of PEPCO at the time.
[33] In 1973 traffic was so low that a spokesperson for the Maryland Department of Economic and Community Development said that no trains had run on the line in 5 to 6 years.
In 1981, the section from Baltimore to Washington, known as the Northeast Corridor (NEC), was sold to Amtrak, and the line from Bowie to Faulkner was retained by Conrail.
In 1954 the Navy gave up ownership of the line and it was handed over to the Pennsylvania Railroad which, in 1962, built a spur from the north side of Hughesville to the new Chalk Point Generating Station to deliver coal and equipment.
[38] In 1965, the PRR quit running trains south of Hughesville and in the 1970's the track was removed, leaving Chalk Point as the only customer.
Chalk Point operator GenOn Energy Holdings closed the two coal-fired units at the plant in June 2021 reducing rail traffic to almost zero.
[42] In 1918-19, during World War I the Navy used German POWs to build a spur off the Pope's Creek Subdivision from White Plains to the Naval Powder Factory at Indian Head to aid in the production of smokeless powder (a propellant used in firearms and artillery).
[52] With the failure of the tourist train the Navy briefly considered using the line to have coal delivered to the base, but found the investment required for repairs was too great, so in 2003 the Navy announced plans to donate the railroad line west of Mattingly Avenue in Indian Head to Charles County for the creation of a trail.
[53] The spur, including the tracks and 6 Long Island Railroad cars that had been abandoned by the IHCR, was donated to Charles County as part of the Federal Lands-to-Parks program in 2006 and the Navy's two locomotives were sold at auction.
[36] A wye track exists at Bowie to allow trains to enter Amtrak's main line and go north or south, so that a second engine or cab car is not needed.
One option took trains down to the Indian Head branch and then across the Potomac on a new 2.5 mile long rail bridge to Arkendale, VA. Another option used the Pope's Creek subdivision all the way to Newberg, MD and then across the Potomac on a two-mile long railway drawbridge to Dahlgren, VA.[60] The plans were never funded.
In 2023, the legislature appropriated $100 million in the state budget for SMRT and the Red Line in Baltimore, and as a result the full planning was funded.
[29] The county acquired the abandoned Pope's Creek Railroad corridor south of Faulkner (and several adjacent properties) in 2014.
