Baltimore Light RailLink
light rail transit system serving Baltimore
The Baltimore Light RailLink (formerly Baltimore Light Rail, also known simply as the "Light Rail") is a light rail system serving Baltimore, Maryland, United States, and its northern and southern suburbs. It is operated by the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA Maryland) and runs from Hunt Valley to Glen Burnie, with a spur to BWI Airport.
In downtown Baltimore, it uses street-embedded tracks. Outside the central portions of the city, the line is located on private rights-of-way, mostly from the defunct Northern Central Railway, Baltimore and Annapolis Railroad and Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railway. The system had a ridership of 5,015,100, or about 17,600 per weekday, as of the second quarter of 2026.
History
Initial segment
The origins of the Light RailLink lie in a 1966 Baltimore area transit plan that envisioned six rapid transit lines radiating from the city center. By 1983, only one of the plan's lines—the "Northwest" line—had been built, becoming the Metro SubwayLink. Much of the plan's "North" and "South" lines ran along rights-of-way once used by interurban streetcar lines and the commuter rail routes of the Northern Central Railway, Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railway, and Baltimore and Annapolis Railroad.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Governor of Maryland and former Baltimore mayor William Donald Schaefer pushed for a transit line along the plan's "North" and "South" corridors, motivated in part by a desire to establish a rail transit link to the new baseball park being built at Camden Yards for the Baltimore Orioles. Light RailLink was built quickly and inexpensively without federal funds, a rarity for a U.S. transit project.
“Baltimore Light RailLink” enters the record as light rail transit system serving Baltimore. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Baltimore, Light and RailLink can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3333820. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2026, 1966 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Baltimore Light RailLink” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.