Can You Help Solve This Mystery? By Bill Schafer

Look at this magnificent B&O photo.  It appeared in the February 1961 Trains Magazine (pp 48-49) with the following caption, by Editor David P. Morgan: “Steam in Full Stride: Gods of the high iron are Baltimore & Ohio EM-1 articulateds 7610 and 7620 as the two Baldwin 2-8-8-4’s momentarily parallel each other on the famous Salt Lick Curve of the West End of the Cumberland Division.  Hotshot, on inside track, overtakes coal drag.”

I was twelve when I first saw this photo in the magazine.  It blew me away but it also looked vaguely familiar.

My two younger sisters and I grew up in Sykesville, Maryland.  Our pediatrician, however, was in Baltimore and our mother frequently schlepped us to his office on North Charles Street.  His name was G. Bowers Mansdorfer, a stern old-school doctor who believed in the benefits of goat’s milk and who, at the end of each visit, warned our mother not to let us drink cow’s milk or eat ice cream.  (Yeah, sure – we lived on a dairy farm.)  Dr. Mansdorfer passed away in 1990 at the age of 86.

In the back of Dr. Mansdorfer’s waiting room was a small lavatory with a sink and a toilet.  It was a plain room, with few decorations except for a framed 8” x 10” black and white photo hanging above the tank of the commode.  That photo was the same one that appeared on pp 48-49 of the February 1961 Trains Magazine.

It has always puzzled me why that photo was in Dr. Mansdorfer’s waiting room loo.  The doctor himself couldn’t recall why it was there.  Some years later, I asked the photographer, Everett L. “Tommy” Thompson, if he knew Dr. Mansdorfer (no) and why the picture was where it was (don’t know).  A more recent inquiry at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the B&O Historical Society yielded only blank stares.

 So I appeal to the old heads in RABO as a last resort: does anyone know why one of the best action photos I have ever seen (of any railroad) held a place of honor in the office of my childhood pediatrician?  If all I get are blank stares, I guess that’s just another of life’s mysteries that will never be solved.