Cumberland

Cumberland announces its geography immediately: the town is pressed into a narrow gap where Wills Creek cuts through the ridge of Wills Mountain, and every street seems to end in a wall of green Allegheny slope. Lia and I stood at the base of the old canal basin downtown, where the 184.5-mile Chesapeake and Ohio Canal officially terminates, and tried to imagine mule-drawn barges arriving here from Georgetown after a journey of nearly two weeks — a pace almost incomprehensible next to the freight trains now idling in the yard beside it.

The towpath and canal history

We rented bikes and rode a stretch of the C&O Canal towpath south of town, the crushed-stone trail running flat and shaded between the old canal bed and the Potomac River, past lock houses built of hand-cut stone. Interpretive signs recount how the canal, finished in 1850, was obsolete almost the moment it opened — the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had already reached Cumberland eight years earlier, racing the canal for the same mountain pass and winning decisively. Lia found something poignant in cycling a route built for a technology that lost before it even finished being built.

Riding the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad

In the afternoon we boarded the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad, a restored steam locomotive that hauls passenger cars up the same grueling grade coal trains once climbed toward Frostburg, sixteen miles and nearly a thousand feet of elevation away. The train switchbacks through the Cumberland Narrows and curves around the dramatic Helmstetter’s Curve, and Lia leaned out the open vestibule the whole way, cinders and coal smoke drifting past, grinning like she’d been handed a childhood fantasy. At the Frostburg depot we had an hour to wander the small mountain town before the whistle called us back down.

Getting There

Cumberland sits just off I-68 in Maryland’s western panhandle, about two and a half hours from both Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and just under two hours from Pittsburgh, making it a reachable weekend trip from several major cities. There is no commercial airport in town, so most visitors arrive by car; Amtrak’s Capitol Limited also stops here on its route between Chicago and Washington, dropping passengers a short walk from the historic downtown.