John F. Baesch's Obituary
Obituary Published in the Baltimore Sun by Frederick N. Rasmussen on November 23, 2023 at 5:00 a.m. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2023/11/23/baltimore-native-john-f-baesch-army-veteran-who-was-a-csx-and-an-amtrak-executive-with-a-fondness-for-sherlock-holmes-dies/
John F. Baesch, an Army veteran who was a retired CSX and Amtrak executive fond of Sherlock Holmes, died Nov. 14 of heart failure at Keswick Multi-Care Center in Roland Park. The South Baltimore resident was 78.
“John was well thought of in the railroad industry,” said E. Ray Lichty, a former CSX executive.
“He was an unusual character who had a great career. While I was content to stay with CSX for 40 years, John moved around a lot,” Mr. Lichty said. “He went from CSX to Amtrak and then Parsons Brinckerhoff, the engineering company, where he really made a name for himself.”
John Francis Baesch, son of Rudolph William Baesch, a furniture store clerk at the old C.J. Benson Co., and Shirley V. Crosby Baesch, a pharmacist’s assistant, was born in Baltimore and raised in Parkville. His primary education was at what is today St. Ursula’s Catholic School in Parkville, and in 1962 he graduated from Loyola Blakefield in Towson.
He entered what is now Loyola University of Maryland in 1962 and enrolled in its Army ROTC program. During his college years, he worked as a copy boy in The Sun’s morning editorial department from 1963 until his graduation in 1966. After graduation and being commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve, he was assigned to the Army Transportation Corps at Fort Eustis, Virginia. Before being called to active duty in 1967, he taught English at the old Southern High School in Federal Hill. In addition to serving at Fort Eustis, he held various assignments in transportation as an officer at what is now Fort Liberty in North Carolina, as well as in Germany, the Netherlands and Vietnam, where he arranged transportation for homeward bound American troops. He was discharged in 1971 with the rank of captain and his decorations included the Bronze Star.
His love of railroading began when he was 7 years old and his father took him on a train ride from the B&O’s Camden Station to Union Station in Washington, “behind steam,” he was fond of telling family and friends. His railroading career began in 1971, when he joined what eventually became CSX’s management training program before becoming part of the railroad’s operating department. In 1974, Mr. Baesch moved over to the casualty prevention department. He left CSX in 1976, after holding a variety of positions including assistant director of train operations, movements desk and car distribution.
While with Amtrak he was part of the team that planned the traffic control center at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. In 1990, he was appointed general manager of the Amtrak-operated commuter rail in the Boston area. Mr. Baesch returned to Philadelphia in 1993 to oversee Amtrak’s day-to-day operations, crew assignments and time keeping.“John was really a character and had a great sense of humor,” Mr. Lichty said. “He loved to tell the story when he was at Amtrak about a brochure that was about shipping the dead, which was titled, ‘The Scheduled Departure for the Recently Departed.’ He had such a dry wit. He’d start to tell you something, pause, smile, and then give you the punch line.”
After retiring from Amtrak in 1999, he joined Parsons Brinckerhoff, an engineering firm, as a senior specialist, a position he held until retiring in 2013. During his time with Parsons Brinckerhoff , he worked on projects for MARC, Virginia Railway Express and the Northeast Corridor. Naturally, his work required a great deal of train riding. “There is joy in riding a train and being around railroad people,” he explained in an interview with the Retired Administrators of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, a CSX retirees’ organization. “Rail travel is particularly not about the geography and equipment (though that’s a real part of it); it is about the people you are with and the people you meet.” In addition to being a collector of B&O’s fabled blue and white dining car china, from which he dined daily, Mr. Baesch was a fan of grand hotels, fine dining and ocean liners, particularly Cunard Line ships, and had been aboard when the line’s Queen Elizabeth 2 made its farewell voyage in 2008.
He was also a student of the RMS Titanic sinking and had served several terms as leader of two Baltimore-area Sherlock Holmes organizations, The Six Napoleons and Watson’s Tin Box.
“John was one of our Napoleons and a very good and solid Sherlockian,” said William J. Hyder, a retired Sunday Sun copy editor and reporter. “As a person, he was very quiet and reserved, a man of few words.”
Mr. Baesch wrote several scholarly articles about Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective and with his wife, Evelyn Herzog, a legal secretary, amassed a collection of works related to Holmes. “He had spent a lot of time in London with Parsons Brinckerhoff and he and Eve were the epitome of Anglophiles,” Mr. Lichty said. He was also an Orioles fan and enjoyed corresponding by letter and postcard with friends across the world.
Mr. Baesch, who lived in the old Southern High School that had been converted to apartments and where he once taught, had been a member for the last 20 years of the Catholic Community of South Baltimore.
His only survivor is his wife of 20 years.
Funeral Mass will be held on March 2, 2024 at St.Ursula Catholic Church, 8801 Harford Road Parkville, MD 21234 at 11:00am. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in John's memory to Catholic Catholic Charities, 320 Cathedral St., Baltimore, MD 21201-4424
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