Thursday, July 2, 2020

Artifact Showcase: B&O Railroad Station Stamps



Continuing with our archive theme, today's TrolleyTime post showcases these two vintage stamps from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's stations in Rockville and Silver Spring, respectively.
These were generally used by ticket agents to imprint the stations on paperwork- tickets, receipts, bills, etc. These two came from a small desktop "tree" that held stamps for many other B&O stations in the mid-Atlantic area, including Washington, DC and Baltimore.
Both the Rockville and Silver Spring stations still exist- the Rockville station is served by MARC and Amtrak trains; the original Silver Spring station is a museum, although MARC commuter trains serve a new facility located down the tracks from the original station.
These two stamps are in a private collection, although they are an accurate representation of the many local history artifacts in our archives - preserving an accurate history of street cars in the Washington DC area comes with the "corequisite" of preserving coinciding local history.