If you’ve been to the Bladensburg Waterfront Park, you’ve seen a cherry-red caboose that commemorates the city’s past as part of the B&O railroad as well as a little-known moment in railroad history.

Nearly 30 years before the first electric passenger train went into service, Bladensburg played a part in a trial run of the first battery-powered train in history.

On April 29, 1851, a patent officer and professor named Dr. Charles Grafton Page set off from Washington, D.C., with several passengers in a railway coach he had designed to prove that an electric train could be competitive with steam-powered trains.

Page had a lot riding on the trial run. After receiving $20,000 in funding from Congress — the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars today — he had gone $6,000 into debt to finish his prototype and refute critics.

It was an utter disaster. Page’s battery involved a pair of metal plates, one immersed in nitric acid, which causes noxious fumes, and the other in sulfuric acid, a highly corrosive acid used today in some drain cleaners.

But the battery was extremely fragile, with no way to cushion it from the “jostling and oscillations” of a typical train trip, and it sparked every time Page switched connections.

Page had hoped to take the prototype along the B&O railroad line all the way to Baltimore. But after 39 minutes, with less than half of his battery cells working and his passengers choking on nitric acid fumes, he decided to turn around in Bladensburg.

With the battery badly damaged, the trip home took two hours.

But for a brief shining moment near Bladensburg, Page’s train lived up to his promises, as he and a friend jerry-rigged the wiring around the broken battery cells, and the engine hit a speed of 19 miles per hour. People waved handkerchiefs from windows of nearby homes.

It was, in the words of one passenger, the realization of a future of “travelling by lightning” — as though they were “propelled by some invisible giant, which by his silence was as impressive as his noisy predecessor.”

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