Directly behind our radio station in Newport, New Hampshire, sits a beautifully preserved brick depot. According to my timetable, Boston and Maine train No. 305 leaves Boston’s North Station at 7:35 AM, arriving at Concord, NH at 9:55, connecting there with No. 3803, which leaves at 10:05, arriving at Newport 11:52. The return trip leaves Newport at 4:03 PM, returning to Concord at 5:38. A connecting train to Boston leaves at 5:55, arriving at North Station at 7:40.
The track between Newport and Concord has been gone for several decades. The date of my timetable is March 1, 1938.
There is no more Boston and Maine Railroad; it and the Maine Central were swallowed almost forty years ago by the Springfield Terminal Railroad to form a company that now uses the name and logo of the defunct Pan Am Airways. The mills and factories that once dominated New England have disappeared to such a degree that most of the railroad lines that once served them are bare road beds overgrown with trees. Some have been turned into bike or snowmobile trails, and one — the Wolfeboro Branch connecting Sanbornville, NH, on the former Conway Branch, to Wolfeboro on Lake Winnipesaukee — has been preserved with its rails intact by a hobbyist group that runs “speeders”, the motorized rail vehicles that replaced the classic hand cars formerly used by maintenance of way crews.
In 1938, that line hosted one train a day in each direction, leaving Sanbornville at 7:40 AM and Wolfeboro at 9:00 AM. These were mixed trains, i.e. freight trains with a rider coach or caboose that carried passengers.
IN 1938, the Boston and Maine offered service between Boston and Montreal on three different routes, via White River Junction, Bellows Falls, or St. Johnsbury (all VT). All three routes have since been abandoned; the former Northern Main Line between Concord and White River Junction is now the Northern Rail Trail. The stub end of this route still serves a few freight customers in Lebanon, NH from White River Junction. Similarly, the stub of the former Cheshire Branch that once carried Montreal-bound passengers through Keene, NH, is used by the Green Mountain Railroad for storage of rolling stock. On a recent drive through the area I spotted two Budd Rail Diesel Cars, one lettered for Boston and Maine, the other for New York Central; and a former passenger car of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad that once served northern Maine. In 1938, this railroad ran the Aroostook Flyer, which departed Portland at noon for the small town of Van Buren in the far north of the state, hard by the Canadian border.
The Rail Diesel Car was a self-propelled rail car built by the Budd Company after World War II. The Boston and Maine bought more than a hundred of them for use on a variety of routes; some ran in MBTA commuter rail service in the Boston area as late as 1985. In 1938, however, almost every train was hauled by steam. An important exception was the Flying Yankee, which left Boston daily for Bangor at noon, running non-stop to Portland, where it arrived at ten minutes to two. By comparison, today’s Amtrak Downeaster leaves Boston at 1:05 weekday afternoons and does not reach Portland until 3:40. Even Boston and Maine’s steam-hauled train No. 11, the Kennebec Limited, leaving Boston at 9:40 AM, reached Portland at 11:45 AM, beating Amtrak by a full half hour.
Bangor was by no means the end of the line; train No. 23, the Gull, ran all the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, running on Boston and Maine, Maine Central, Canadian Pacific, and Canadian National rails. It took just over 24 hours to make the run. Today, by contrast, the farthest you can travel by train from Boston’s North Station is Brunswick, Maine, where a single disused track stretches north toward Augusta, the state capital, while a lightly used branch line runs up the coast to Rockland. This latter hosted summer tourist trains as recently as a couple years ago. In 1938, three trains a day connected Portland with Rockland via Brunswick, each with a Boston connection. The Rockland terminal station is well preserved.
Passenger service north of Portland was run by the Maine Central Railroad, which discontinued all of its passenger trains on September 30, 1960. Service between Boston and Portland on the Boston and Maine continued for another five years before being cut back to Dover (N.H.) and finally, on June 30, 1967, discontinued north of the Boston suburb of Reading. Concord, NH lost service to Boston on the same day, although it was revived briefly by the MBTA in the early 1980’s. There is currently no passenger rail service in New Hampshire other than Amtrak’s Downeaster, which stops at Exeter, Durham, and Dover; and Amtrak’s Vermonter, which makes a single daily stop in each direction at Claremont, an old mill town on the Connecticut River. Manchester, the largest city in the state, hasn’t seen a passenger train since 1981, even as I-93 and the Everett Turnpike, the principal roads south, have grown increasingly congested in the intervening decades.
One of the most scenic rail routes in New England was Maine Central’s Mountain Division from Portland, Maine, to St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Most of this line, which hosted a daily passenger train between Portland and Montreal until the mid 1950’s, has been abandoned since the mid 1980’s, although the track is still in place and parts of it are used by the Conway Scenic Railway, a tourist operation. When I saw the Vermont end of this line a couple years ago, it had almost completely returned to nature, with large trees growing between the rails. There has been talk of using part of the other end of the line for commuter rail service to Portland, but Maine has no money for such a service, even if the state does fund the popular five-times-daily Amtrak Downeaster service between Boston and Brunswick via Portland.
Suburban rail service in the Boston area has undergone something of a renaissance in recent decades, thanks to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), a state agency that subsidizes commuter rail service in eastern Massachusetts. Most recently, weekend summer service from Boston to Cape Cod was restored a couple years ago after several decades. Yet many journeys that used to be commonplace remain impossible; rails are long gone and rail beds built over or surrendered to the weeds.
In my childhood I remember walking with my grandfather down to the H.H. Richardson-designed granite depot at Wellesley Farms to see the New York Central’s commuter trains, and, if we were lucky, the westbound New England States, NYC’s crack Boston-Chicago train. My grandfather told me that in his youth, the four-track main line hosted 56 trains a day. By the late sixties there were only two tracks, the other two having been taken up to accommodate the Massachusetts Turnpike, and just the States and three weekday commuter runs to Framingham. In Needham, I remember standing on the corner of Highland Avenue and West Street as a single Rail Diesel Car with New Haven markings crossed West Street, pulled to a stop, discharged a few passengers, and went back the way it came. Needham today gets regular MBTA commuter rail service, but the towns west of there formerly served by the New Haven have none; the rails have been removed for a bike path as far as Millis. Similarly, lines that used to serve Arlington, Lexington, Wayland, and Sudbury are gone. The last train on the Lexington Branch was stopped by a blizzard in 1977, and service never resumed. There is hardly a town in eastern Massachusetts that doesn’t bear signs of an abandoned rail line that used to support factories, mills, and farms now long defunct.
I read somewhere that in 1861, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had a greater industrial output than the entire Confederacy. As late as World War II, the factories and mills of New England made a major contribution to the Allied war effort. One is left to wonder how we would fare in either war if we had to fight them today.