Boston and Maine in film

[JCitron]

Here's a 'companion' film to the New Haven in film.

The Boston and Maine started in the 1830s and eventually controlled nearly all of the rail lines in northern Massachusetts and nearly all of those in New Hampshire. The railroad was friendly with the Maine Central and for many years partnered together and even shared equipment on passenger trains. They were friendly rivals of the New Haven with the New Haven having all of southern Massachusetts and all of Connecticut and Rhode Island. The B&M did, however, have a nemesis, and that was the Boston and Albany a railroad controlled and wholly-owned by the New York Central.

In the 1910s, JP Morgan gained control of the B&M and New Haven. While this gave both roads cash, and allowed the B&M to electrify the Hoosac Tunnel, the cash influx was short-lived. The New Haven and Boston and Maine had plans to expand their routes and electrify core main lines including the routes from Boston to East Deerfield where the two lines crossed and the former Eastern Railroad from Boston to Portsmouth. As we know, this never occurred.

JP Morgan pulled out cash from both New Haven and Boston and Maine to prevent himself from going bankrupt during the Panic of 1916. This forced both roads into bankruptcy which led to trimming of branch lines and some major lines. During the boom times, the B&M purchased the Worcester, Nashua, Rochester, and Portland mostly to kill it due to the competition and this line all but disappeared in the 1920s during the restructuring and the B&M was out of bankruptcy in 1923 only to face the Depression and then Patrick McGuiness in the mid-1950s to early 60s. The Depression and post WW II saw more branch lines trimmed, mostly due to lack of service and lack of cash, and McGuinness did his part in trimming more.

Under McGuiness's control, the road faced cuts in passenger service and a reduction in freight operations much like what occurred on his New Haven, and ended up bankrupt again. McGuiness went to prison after scrapping and selling their turbo train and pocketing the cash.

After trimming more lines and selling off assets, the B&M emerged from bankruptcy in the early 1980s only to be purchased outright by Guilford Transportation Industries. Guilford was formed by stakeholders in the Maine Central. Guilford, however, was not interested in running railroads and only saw the combined MEC and B&M operations as real estate to sell off. The company focused on through routes only and all but eliminated all branch line feeder lines all while selling off ROW and land to developers. In 2022, Guilford, now renamed Pan Am Railways, sold itself to CSX. CSX is currently rebuilding both the MEC and B&M.

 

[UP5521]

Nice find again John, Well I'm glad csx is rebuilding the lines that Morgan and McGuiness ruined, shady business dealings most times will get you in serious trouble, the depression was bad enough but there is some difference, some of their steam engines are preserved unlike the new haven who scrapped theirs before given the chance to be saved, but man, what a mess all around.

 

[JCitron]

Nice find again John, Well I'm glad csx is rebuilding the lines that Morgan and McGuiness ruined, shady business dealings most times will get you in serious trouble, the depression was bad enough but there is some difference, some of their steam engines are preserved unlike the new haven who scrapped theirs before given the chance to be saved, but man, what a mess all around.

Yeah, we lost a lot up here mostly due to McGuiness. Many of the lines, prior to McGuinness, the B&M got rid of were pretty devoid of traffic. I read through, and even posted something about it here, the list of abandonment filings by the B&M. One of the lines not far from me ran from Lawrence to Salem. Known as the Essex Railroad because it exists only in Essex County, the line was built as a siphon by the Eastern Railroad to pull lucrative mill business off of its competitor the B&M and never posted a profit. The line was abandoned in sections after the 1923 reorganization. Lawrence to Steven's Mills remained in place until the mills came down in the mid-1960s, thanks to a suspicious fire. The line was cut back to High Street where it served the Davis and Furber machinery company until the 1980s along with an industrial park. That remained until some vandals torched the wooden trestle over the mill pond. The Salem end ran as far as Danvers where it intersected the former Wakefield to Newburyport line. That line served various industries until Guilford did their usual along with vandals torching the bridge over the Danvers River. There are talks of reopening that line, but you know how that goes.

When the section between North Andover and Danvers was abandoned, the biggest customer on the line in Hathorne, MA (Danvers) was the power plant for the Danvers State Hospital. By this time, they had switched to trucks and the railroad lost that business. The total revenue listed, at the time of abandonment was about $8 (not thousands), a lousy $8 bucks! The RR still had to pay crews and for maintenance. This played out on many other branches including the Lawrence and Lowell, where revenue was just as bad as it picked up 4 or 5 passengers for a month.

McGuiness, though killed the system by removing what made them money. He cut back the high and wide line and deferred maintenance on others while selling off equipment. One of the many lines he killed was the line to Troy, NY line and also the Eastern Railroad from Portsmouth to Portland. The Eastern was a fast line, double-tracked from the start that avoided all the grades the rest of the roundabout Boston and Maine ran on.

Then came Guilford in 1983 and they slashed and chopped their way across the system eliminating the local business by discouraging companies from using rails. The strike in the 90s didn't help after they busted the unions and cut crew causing a death in Lawrence Yard. Many branch lines are gone now and will never come back and business is hard to return. Their worst thing was to defer maintenance on the mainlines outside of greater Boston where they don't own anything except for some yard track and that's mostly gone now. The once 40 mph freight lines were reduced to barely reaching 10 mph. They killed the Conn-River line to a point that Amtrak pulled its service from that. They killed the Maine Central Mountain Division, and the B&M Berlin branch in New Hampshire as well as the Lower Road in Maine, among many other lines.

Today, CSX is rebuilding lines up in Maine that see traffic to and from Canada. When they first took over, they rebuilt the Worcester main immediately. This was one of the few segments of the former Worcester, Rochester, Nashua, and Portland remaining in operation and serves as an important connection today. The line was down to a crawl with traffic crossing a reservoir with rails that were sinking into the mud. They put in welded rail and brought the line up to a safe running standard. They still have a lot to do and hopefully things will get better. I have noticed an uptick in freight service, including freight during the day, which was rare under Pan Am and Guilford.

 

[UP5521]

Well, I guess when all of that happened back then, it got worse before it got better.

 

[UP5521]

Whoa , John, hold up, I agree, but it wasn't just McGuiness who fouled up things, his thugs were there working behind the scenes with him as well, also When you mentioned the potatoes, yeah I thought that was a interesting idea when it was moved by rail, but some of the railroads you mentioned especially the B&M and Maine Central were left financially devastated at the end of it all, forcing the farmers to take their business elsewhere but let's also not lose sight of penn Central who was involved and they also used a good amount of the tracks which suffered due to the lack of proper maintenance thus resulting in derailments then lost a train that they were supposed to be tracking, or the aforementioned product being hauled or allowed to rot inside the boxcars on a train that was assembled but was not moved in the railyard, I couldn't imagine the smell, so yeah, again, what a messy situation, all of that because of one or several rail companies being greedy and corrupt.

 

[JCitron]

Whoa , John, hold up, I agree, but it wasn't just McGuiness who fouled up things, his thugs were there working behind the scenes with him as well, also When you mentioned the potatoes, yeah I thought that was a interesting idea when it was moved by rail, but some of the railroads you mentioned especially the B&M and Maine Central were left financially devastated at the end of it all, forcing the farmers to take their business elsewhere but let's also not lose sight of penn Central who was involved and they also used a good amount of the tracks which suffered due to the lack of proper maintenance thus resulting in derailments then lost a train that they were supposed to be tracking, or the aforementioned product being hauled or allowed to rot inside the boxcars on a train that was assembled but was not moved in the railyard, I couldn't imagine the smell, so yeah, again, what a messy situation, all of that because of one or several rail companies being greedy and corrupt.

Yup. The Bangor and Aroostock lost its shirt on its lucrative potato business in the 70s. Maine Central too but not as much as the BAR because their business was more general freight and the paper industry. The BAR never recovered after this, once farmers moved to trucks.

Guilford's operating management came from guess where? The Penn Central and ran the combined MEC-B&M-D&H the same way. Tracks got so bad in Lawrence Yard that freight cars would fall over by themselves as tracks collapsed. They discouraged business on branch lines by letting them rot and one line had trees growing out of it to a point where a branch poked the fuel tank on a GP40-2. With customers being told they had to fork over more money for deliveries along with the deferred maintenance, lines were abandoned. Where I live, we lost the southern end of the former Manchester and Lawrence, once an important line that was chopped apart during B&M years but was still busy at either end.

In Manchester there were a bunch of plastic companies and some lumber yards among other companies out on the old M&L but instead of maintaining the business, Guilford killed the business. On the southern end, from North Lawrence to Salem, New Hampshire were a bunch of light industries in a small industrial park including a plastic bag manufacturer and up the line a bit was a feed and grain dealer. Further south, in Methuen and Lawrence was a small industrial park with a couple of warehouses and manufacturers and in Lawrence was a plastics company, a steel foundry, Malden Mills, and Agway.

Guilford let the line rot, literally then filed for abandonment in 2001 after a washout occurred on the Southern New Hampshire side. They couldn't rip up the tracks on the Mass side of the border because they were owned by the state, but shortly afterwards the scam Ironhorse rail trail group convinced the T to rip up the tracks from the Lawrence line to the New Hampshire line through Methuen. They then stuck Methuen with the $150K trail maintenance costs for a trail no one uses because the area is unsafe.

The famous Hoosac Tunnel line from East Deerfield west was reduced to 10 mph from 40 mph running. The tracks were so bad in Athol, MA that freight trains would outlaw on their 450-mile journey from North Maine Junction in Bangor ME. It took NS's investment of $29 million into the joint Pan Am Southern operation to bring the tracks up to 25 mph. NS management complained that PAR wasn't interested in even maintaining that and they had to keep going back and doing their own work on the line again. That line is under operation by GWI and is run as the Berkshire and Eastern using NS and former PAR crews and equipment, or locomotives lettered for their Providence and Worcester with CSX owning the tracks and NS partnering with GWI.

They used to lose freight cars all the time I heard from someone who worked for them. He was out one day in Lawrence searching for boxcars and calling back on the radio. He then drove off to check Lowell, Ayer, and Fitchburg yards. I saw this with other freight too including reefers and hoppers.

Locomotives used to catch fire, or run out of fuel mid-route. Imagine a 50-car freight, GTI and PAR never ran really long freights, running out of fuel somewhere on the line! Locos used to blow turbos all the time and others just burned up because. When they initially took over, they took B&Ms fleet of GP40-2s and MEC GEs and ran them into the ground much like the Dash-8s they purchased from CSX.

This barely scratches the surface of what was done by the former Penn Central management. PCs problems weren't caused by two companies competing internally and the inability to get things together, it was caused by outright piss poor management practices and corporate greed.

 

[UP5521]

Jeez that sounds eerily similar to great Britain and here I thought that it was a mess over there but man was I wrong, that couldn't hold a candle because of the Corruption here in the states, what a mess, that is scary when a locomotive catches fire, the aforementioned segment of track being cutback, vicious speed restrictions and in one post you said something about the new York Central and Pennsylvania railroad were rivals but things got sour and eventually merged into a new company but were really financially unstable and bankrupt at the end of it all taking some other neighbouring railroads with them, which created the abomination to begin with and added to the problems that were mentioned ,what a huge mess, if that was my railroad that I worked so hard to build and work on, I'd be livid.

 

[JCitron]

Yup. NYC and PRR were hurting by the 60s due to highway competition like other railroads, especially those in the Northeast where industry was declining as well. Their ill-fated merger had to include the New Haven Railroad as well and they killed that due to piss poor management and the fact that they didn't want it in the first place. When the Poughkeepsie bridge burned suspiciously in the 70s, this killed connecting railroads that were avoiding the congestion and control of the lines around greater NY City such as the Erie Lackawanna.

Because they went down, they were bailed out by the formation of Conrail. When Conrail was formed, other railroads were offered to join in, a bad move for them, because that removed the competition from the PC as they wanted. The same management, that ruined the PRR and NYC and NH, were now set to kill their competition completely and severed two faster routes west. The Erie got severed west of Mansfield, OH. This was a quicker, less roundabout and flatter route than the PC's routes to Chicago. Prior to Conrail, the EL was running 60 and 70 mph TOFC trains from New Jersey to Chicago. Their line was built to 5' 6" standards and was double-track most of the way.

The Lehigh Valley was severed at Sayre, PA. Their route to Buffalo was also a direct competitor to NYC's line to the same location. Sure, both were hurting due to the downturn in coal and big industry but still if they too had received a direct bailout, rather than merging into Conrail, things would've been different.

Speed restrictions were required on Guilford's main line because the tracks were so bad. The Conn-River line from Springfield to Berlin, NH was so bad that Amtrak moved to New England Central today and still does a backup and reverse move to Springfield at Palmer as far as I know.

 

[Forester1]

Ironic that so many railroads were hurt by trucking competition, and now I'd give anything to get all these d*****d trucks off the freeway! Put 'em on a train! Out west here we are getting to need six lane freeways, so that the cars can have at least one lane when there is a solid line of trucks passing trucks taking up the other two lanes!

 

[JCitron]

Ironic that so many railroads were hurt by trucking competition, and now I'd give anything to get all these d*****d trucks off the freeway! Put 'em on a train! Out west here we are getting to need six lane freeways, so that the cars can have at least one lane when there is a solid line of trucks passing trucks taking up the other two lanes!

It's the same here. The sad part is Pan Am Railways, the final version of Guilford after they changed their paint to blue and black, encouraged customers to go to trucks. Now that customers have gone to trucks, it's difficult to get the freight back on to the rails.