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Town of Sykesville Old Main Line Visitor Center And Post Office Hours of Operation
Daily mail pick-up is 2:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Mail received after 2:00 p.m. will be postmarked the next business day. The Post Office address is 731 Oklahoma Avenue, Sykesville, MD 21784, the phone # is 410-552-9975. The drive up mail box, formerly located on Main Street at the Corner of Main & Sandosky is now located directly across the street (Oklahoma Avenue) from the Post Office.
History of the original building The former B&P Junction interlocking tower, which from 1910 until 1988 served as a proud sentinel to railroading just south of Baltimore's Penn Station, and almost got lost to the wrecking ball afterwards, has found a new home. The town of Sykesville, Maryland, acquired salvageable parts to the structure and intends to reconstruct it this spring for use as a welcome and information center. The site for the tower will be along Oklahoma Avenue, in front of a former Pullman sleeping car, not far from the old Sykesville train station. A portion of the ground floor of the building will be used as a place for visitors and residents to pick up brochures and information on town events and to view displays and photographs depicting local scenes. Another portion of the ground floor will be occupied by the Sykesville & Patapsco Railway Association to store its model train equipment. The top floor, where the operator once worked, will be a 20-by-38-foot open area for use as meeting space. Visitors may also use this space to get a panoramic view of the town through its 20 large windows. B&P, named for the old Baltimore & Potomac Railway, had the largest interlocking plant between Philadelphia and Washington. With 107 levers on its machine, it controlled part of the Northern Central branch, the switches into the old sleeper yard, the tracks leading to Calvert and Hillen stations, as well as main track moves between Penn Station and B&P Tunnel. Other action in its time included moves onto the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad directly across from the tower, and moves up the high-line behind the tower to the B&O diamond at North Avenue en route to Mount Vernon yard. The tower closed as an active office on July 14, 1988. The building sat unused for a number of years, but it was in the way of construction of the Penn Station leg of Baltimore's light-rail line. In 1995, the city of Bowie, Maryland, agreed to take the building for a park project, possibly as a boat house, but not as a tower museum since it already had one of those. B&P Tower's top floor was dismantled (its base remained at the original site and remains there today) and its parts were stored in an unprotected area. Plans for the park project never reached fruition. When the town of Sykesville acquired the salvageable parts, it was noted that much of the rest of the original building had deteriorated too badly for use. An architect was hired to design the building patterned after the original and incorporating as much of the original material as possible.
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