Railroad Station, Hagerstown

Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division

The Hagerstown & Frederick Railway (H&F) not only outlived most of its contemporaries, but it begat a sprawling multistate public electric utility company. The H&F was a rustic country trolley system in the classic Toonerville mold, reminiscent of the antiquated trolley popularized in Fontaine Fox’ cartoon Toonerville Folks (1908-19555) and the Toonerville Trolley films.

In 1896, a pair of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, entrepreneurs opened a six-mile suburban streetcar between Hagerstown and Williamsport, and in the same year Frederick County farmers and businessmen completed a more venturesome project connecting Frederick and Middletown.

Their Frederick & Middletown Railway roughly followed what is now Alternate U.S. Route 40, climbing the Catoctin ridge at Braddock Heights. To stimulate more patronage in its rural territory, its promoters simultaneously established Braddock Heights Park at the top of the mountain, with its breathtaking view of the Middletown Valley and South Mountain to the west. However, the Frederick & Middletown’s birth hardly made a good first impression. On Sunday, August 23rd, 1896, the day after its official opening, a seriously overloaded car ran away down the mountain on its way home to Frederick and derailed at high speed. Miraculously, only one person was killed, but many were badly injured.

Nonetheless, the trolley persevered, and over the next 15 years a network of electric lines totaling 76 miles spread out from both Frederick and Hagerstown, including a route directly connecting the two cities. In 1913, Emory Coblenz, a Middletown lawyer and banker, consolidated these lines into a single entity called the Hagerstown & Frederick Railway.

In its peak years, the H&F could boast a “main line” between Frederick and Hagerstown via Middletown, Myersville, and Funkstown, plus branches to Thurmont, Boonsboro, Jefferson, Williamsport, and Shady Grove, Pennsylvania. At Thurmont, H&F trolleys exchanged both passengers and freight cars with the Western Maryland Railway, and at Shady Grove, riders transferred to cars of an affiliated company for Pen Mar Park, Greencastle, and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. H&F streetcars shuttled city riders around both Frederick and Hagerstown, and electric freight locomotives switched numerous Frederick industries.

Although impressive on a map, the Hagerstown & Frederick was really just a picturesque collection of rural interurban lines that ran alongside roadways, meandered across meadows and farmlands, and climbed painfully over two mountain ranges. But there was another side to the trolley company. Because the electric cars demanded more power than the primitive local utilities of the time could provide, Coblenz also built a high-capacity generating plant at Security, near Hagerstown. Before long the tail was wagging the dog as the company’s power network came to dominate central Maryland and spread over three other states. Recognizing the new order of things, the Hagerstown & Frederick Railway was renamed the Potomac Edison Company in 1923.

Oddly, that was the trolley’s salvation. By the early 1930s, the rail network was economically obsolete and parts were abandoned by Potomac Edison, including half of the Frederick-Hagerstown “main line.” But the big and wealthy utility seemingly could not face discarding its onetime parent entirely, and three routes survived into the late 1940s. It was not until November 1953 that the last electric car--and the country’s last “trolley that meets all the trains”--made its run between Frederick and Thurmont. Potomac Edison Company is now part of Allegheny Energy, Inc.

Harwood, Herbert H., Jr. Blue Ridge Trolley: The Hagerstown & Frederick Railway. San Marino, Calif.: Golden West Books, 1970, 1994 (reprint).