Bryan Cooper starts his day in the dark with a sharp ping of the warning bell on his light rail train. Hours before dawn, when commercial bread bakers are not long out of bed, he conveys them to their floury ovens.
He’s a light rail operator who gets to his job somewhere around 3 a.m. Before long he’s moving along the rails from Hunt Valley in Northern Baltimore County to BWI or Cromwell in Anne Arundel. Along the way he’s rolling through Mount Washington, Woodberry, Reservoir Hill, Mount Vernon and Cherry Hill, plus a long stretch of Howard Street in downtown Baltimore.
Cooper took his final train out this week. His official Maryland Department of Transportation retirement date is a few weeks away but he stepped down from his last shift at the North Avenue light rail depot days ago.
He’s made friends along the way. Passengers waved, took pictures and posted them on Facebook. Someone put up a printed sign near his cab announcing his last run.
But he’ll still be operating what light rail used to be known as — a streetcar. He’s a longtime member of the Baltimore Streetcar Museum and operates the cars along the historic Falls Road rails this institution maintains on many weekends.
Bryan Cooper, 59, gets a hug from fellow MTA light rail operator Denise Bryant, who relieved him at the end of his final run. (Amy Davis/Staff)
Cooper is a native Baltimorean. He grew up on Auchentoroly Terrace facing Druid Hill Park. As a teen he played neighborhood baseball on a diamond facing the Park Terminal, one of the landmark streetcar depots that dotted the city.
That’s not where he picked up his fascination with transit vehicles.
As an elementary school student at the old Francis Street School, he watched buses leaving and returning to a Mass Transit Administration facility on Retreat Street. Like so many of the old and Victorian looking converted bus garages (it served rail vehicles for decades), the Retreat Street “barn” held a certain urban allure.
“My father was an accountant and that’s what he wanted me to be,” said Cooper. “I could not stand to be in an office. I came home and dreamed about numbers. It drove me crazy.”
Cooper made a career change he does not regret. He began driving buses in the 1980s and never looked back. He drove for private lines and then operated BWI shuttles and commuter runs to Washington, D.C. and Columbia.
He’s not one to complain but he admits that District of Columbia traffic was “unbearable.”
He found Baltimore’s bus routes through North Baltimore’s Roland Park and Guilford to be “picturesque.” He liked the tight twists and turns through Rodgers Forge’s rowhouses. His favorite was the time he spent on the east side of town — Kingsville and Parkville southward, on what was then called the No. 15 along Belair Road. (After a transit line renaming, it is a CityLink route.)
“The No. 23 line to Wilson Point and Victory Villa was quiet, back in that part of the county. Not too many people rode back there,” he said of the water-adjacent byways of Eastern Baltimore County.
He’s also served the noisy and no-nonsense urban routes. He’s piloted the Greenmount Avenue-York Road line known as the No. 8 in the days before its designation changed to the Red Line.
He’s crossed every neighborhood in the city a couple of times a day during his long career hauling passengers.
“I’m not a fan of drunk passengers,” he said of an occupational hazard of his profession.
He moved on to become a light rail operator in 2008.
Cooper is an ambassador for cities and their transit systems. He travels to Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Pittsburgh to see how they haul their passengers. He is a member of streetcar museums in the Washington suburbs and in western Pennsylvania.
Cooper admits to having a nice collection of miniature buses at home. He’ll also be devoting free time to the painstaking restoration of a classic streetcar at Baltimore’s museum.
“Bryan is a terrific worker and is so very good at what he does,” says John Engleman, a fellow Baltimore Streetcar volunteer. “But what makes him so special is his personality.”