Chesapeake Beach Railroad
Engine House

Library of Congress,
Historic American Engineering Record

The handmaiden of a grandiose dream gone awry, the Chesapeake Beach Railway was built in the late 1890s to connect Washington with a proposed extravagant gambling resort on Chesapeake Bay. The resort, named Chesapeake Beach, did materialize, but in far lesser form than planned. The railroad, however, spent its short life struggling, and died at age 35 in the midst of the Depression.

In the early 1890s, reaching the ocean from Washington, D.C., was a difficult, time-consuming chore, but in the early 1890s entrepreneurs thought that the Chesapeake Bay would make an excellent nearby water resort. In 1891, Baltimore lawyer (and later Maryland governor) Edwin Warfield, wealthy Washington, businessman James L. Barbour, and others organized the Washington & Chesapeake Beach Railway to reach 3,000 acres of virgin bay front property at Fishing Creek. Their Chesapeake Beach resort was to be a vacation spot for the rich and middle class alike, with two grand hotels, a boardwalk, racetrack, and amusements. A pier would accommodate Chesapeake Bay excursion steamers from Baltimore, Annapolis, and Eastern Shore points.

But little was done, and in 1896 the enterprise was reorganized as the Chesapeake Beach Railway, backed by two Colorado millionaires--the railroad builder and silver mine speculator Otto Mears and financier and fellow railroad builder David Moffat. Mears embellished the beach dream further, envisioning an “American Monte Carlo” by supplementing the huge hotels and racetrack with a large gambling casino and ornate clubhouse.

The resort’s railway began at the far northeast corner of the District Line at Seat Pleasant, where a city streetcar line brought passengers from downtown Washington. From there it stretched 30 miles in almost a straight line across the sparsely populated fields, woods, and swamps of Prince George’s and Calvert counties to Chesapeake Beach. Upper Marlboro was the only intermediate town of any note along the route. Railroad construction started in 1897, and the first train chuffed into the still-uncompleted new complex in 1900.

There was instant trouble, though. While the racetrack, casino, and clubhouse were completed, the requirements of Maryland’s gaming and horseracing laws were not adequately checked. Thus, the Monte Carlo idea swiftly vaporized. The grand hotels were never built, and the resort evolved into a modest cottage community and amusement park frequented by crowds of day-trippers brought by the railroad and steamers. Mears dropped out in 1902, leaving Moffat and his successors to deal from afar with the dream’s residue.

Designed essentially as a single-purpose railroad to move people to the summer resort, the railway was financially weak at best. Most of its passenger business moved only three or four months of the year, and the agricultural freight traffic was modest. As roads were improved, beach-bound vacationers increasingly took to their new automobiles in the 1920s and early 30s. The Depression ended whatever slim hope there was, and the railway was abandoned in 1935.

But the far western three miles of its line inside the District remained viable to switch coal for the electric power plant at Benning, D.C., and this tiny section was reorganized as the East Washington Railway – still controlled from Denver, Colorado. In that form it survived until 1978, following the power plant’s switch to oil fuel.

Ames W. Williams. Otto Mears Goes East: The Chesapeake Beach Railway. Alexandria, Va.: Meridian Sun Press, 1975.