Washington, Brandywine and Point Lookout Railroad
railway line in the United States of America
The Washington, Brandywine & Point Lookout Railroad (WB&PL) (originally, the Southern Maryland Railroad) was an American railroad that operated in southern Maryland and Washington, D.C., from 1918 to 1942. It and other, shorter-lived entities used the right-of-way from 1883 to 1965. The single-track line connected Mechanicsville, Maryland, to the Pennsylvania Railroad in Brandywine. Most of the rail was constructed by the Southern Maryland Railroad, which also built a section of track in East Washington that was intended to connect with this line but never did. The WB&PL was later acquired by the Navy, which extended the line to Cedar Point and the Patuxent Naval Air Station. In 1962, the Pennsylvania Railroad constructed a spur from Hughesville, Maryland to the Chalk Point Generating Station. During the 1960s and 1970s, the section from Hughesville to Cedar Point was abandoned and removed, and this area has since been repurposed for a highway, roads, a utility corridor, and a bike trail. The section from Brandywine to Hughesville, extending to Chalk Point, remains in use, though infrequently, as the plant ceased using coal in 2022.
History
Southern Maryland Railroad
Planning for a railroad to Point Lookout started in 1866.
The Southern Maryland Railroad (SMR) was incorporated on March 20, 1868, “for the purpose of constructing, maintaining, and working a railroad from some point in Prince George’s County to Point Lookout.” The planned right-of-way ran along the peninsula created by two rivers: the Potomac and Patuxent.
“Washington, Brandywine and Point Lookout Railroad” enters the record as railway line in the United States of America. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Washington, Brandywine and Point can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Washington, Brandywine and Point Lookout Railroad” 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.