BALTIMORE — One February day, he climbed onto the rail bed himself, with lengths of string to measure the curvature and tilt of the tracks.
Other times, at night, on weekends and vacations, he pored over technical papers, filed Freedom of Information Act requests for data and familiarized himself with such concepts as transverse detail fractures, fouled ballast and vertical track deflection.
“I was kind of obsessed,” Mark Mayr says now, “and she was tolerant.”
