Sometimes, there’s nothing better for a venerable institution than a good disaster. Catastrophe visited upon a beloved place brings benefactors running like rock musicians with plummeting CD sales to a concert for African debt relief.

Baltimore’s B&O Transportation Museum’s windfall was actually a roof-fall. The heavy snow of February 2003 brought down a portion of the 130-year-old dome crowning the roundhouse where the museum’s most prized rail equipment is kept. Magnifying the cruelty of the structural failure was the fact that the iron and wood debris bombed some of the oldest and rarest locomotives and cars in existence, severely damaging, if not destroying them.

While financial help was eagerly given and fans waited to take their kids to a place where they had been taken and their parents had been taken, the closed museum did some long-needed sprucing up and expansion along with the complete reconstruction of the dome. The result is an attraction with many new features but which still retains a lot of the familiar treasures that generations have been wandering around and climbing into (if permitted) since 1953.

The old exhibits always did and still sit there like tombstones; the new features tend to be live and moving. There is now an actual train ride, albeit it a rough and bumpy one, through the old Mount Clare property to the restoration facility. The outdoor portion of the site is now a bit less junk-yardy with a picnic/event pavilion and an extensive garden railroad.

Happily the museum took charge collection of Edwin P. Alexander models that were displaced from the Smithsonian Museum of American History when its train exhibit was re-proportioned for “America on the Move.” These models are an improvement over the push-button light show that attempted to instruct visitors in the 80s and 90s but which only appealed to those who like to push buttons and see lights.

On the loss side, the model railroad that was on the second floor for 50 years is no more. A new handicapped-accessible HO layout stretches the length of one of the passenger cars in the yard. The relocation of the main entrance has made the 1831 Mount Clare station, the oldest in the U.S., a backwater exhibit room. Coming in through its ancient double doors always gave one a sense or really beginning at the beginning.