Railroad Artifacts At The Museum

Railroad Artifacts At The Museum. Chesapeake Beach Railway. , The Chesapeake Beach Railway ran trains to Chesapeake Beach from 1900 until the bankruptcy of the Railway in 1935. After that time the East Washington Railway operated out of the maintenance yard and roundhouse at Seat Pleasant, Maryland. Between 1935 and 1945 the surviving CBR equipment, including engines, was sold or scrapped. No complete engine or any engine parts from that railway are known to survive., The railway locomotive cabs that you see here are the type found on the small steam locomotives operated by The Chesapeake Beach Railway. They were rescued from the abandoned railway yards at Seat Pleasant by members of The Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum Committee. In 1979 the Museum Committee and the Board of Calvert County Commissioners agreed to save all remnants of the CBR and other documents of local railroading history. The cabs were moved to the Museum at that time. Here they are being preserved for the enjoyment and education of the community. , Although these cabs are only a small part of the whole steam locomotive, they help make history come alive in the present. They are a real fragment of the past that will allow us to touch that history for many years to come., How a Steam Locomotive Works , A small locomotive is a machine with two main parts. The first part is a firebox and boiler where steam is produced. The second part is the engine where steam energy is converted into mechanical motion. Cylinders on the engine contain pistons that are pushed by steam pressure. This force in turn pushes the pistons back and forth, propelling the connecting rods and thus turning the drive wheels. The locomotive then moves forward or backward depending on the engineer's use of the Johnson bar, or direction control., Most of the controls for the operation of the engine are located on the boiler backhead in the cab where the engineer and the fireman sit. The fireman stokes the fire with coal. Then the engine will move forward as the engineer releases the brakes and opens the throttle allowing steam into the cylinder. The throttle is the lever used to start the engine and control the speed. To stop the locomotive the engineer applies the brakes then closes the throttle., Ready to go? All aboard!