It is sad to see this. My area too was covered with lines, but the railroads were over built in some areas which didn't have the business, or were used a pawns in corporate takeover scams. In some cases, branch lines were built out of the way because landowners either didn't want the line near them, or some stakeholder wanted the railroad near them. Here's an interesting thing which happened in my area.
Starting about 1832, what was to become the Boston and Maine, was built as two separate companies. The Boston and Lowell was built between the two respective cities and completed around 1834. Another company, the Andover and Wilmington connected between the two respective towns and had trackage rights over the B&L to head into Boston, which was the big city of the time, the state capitol, and still is quite busy today.
The problem though is the B&L had exclusive rights and the A&W, which also connected to the Andover and Haverhill, and the Haverhill and Exeter and the Exter and Portland, represented a long through route to Portland Maine - the ultimate destination of the what became the B&M. When the trains got to Wilmington, they sat and sat, and sat, and sat until the B&L would let them run. The B&L, you see had the lucrative Lowell commuter and textile market all to themselves while the other companies had to play second fiddle.
In the meantime, the B&M or what became the B&M, realigned their Portland to Boston connections the present mainline today. The A&W and it's connections were consolidated around 1842/45 time period. They also built a couple of side branches to basically bust chops on the B&L. Among the branches was the Lawrence and Lowell. This line was supposed to follow the Merrimack River from South Lawrence to downtown Lowell. This didn't happen and the line was rerouted via Tewksbury. This roundabout route made the branch quite a bit longer, though they did add in a couple of other stations plus business with the state hospital. The reason the line was rerouted this is because the major stockholders in Tewksbury wanted their own train service, which didn't have any at the time. They also built a line from Tewksbury to Peabody with a connection with the A&W at Wilmington Jct.
The B&M also built it's actual mainline and completed that in the 1850s. This route branched off of what is Wilmington Jct. today, about where the old A&W heads to Wilmington - that line is still in use today as the "Wildcat branch". The actual B&M mainline continues via Reading and on to Wakefield then Boston via Malden, and this line is still in use today for commuter trains. When this line was completed, the B&L sued the B&M for breech of contract, and attempted to force them into bankruptcy.
That didn't happen, and the B&M absorbed the B&L in the late 1880s along with the competing Eastern Railroad, which ran up the coast between Boston, Portsmouth, and Portland. Portions of this line are still in use today from Boston to Newburyport with the line north of that abandoned, and the Fitchburg Railroad, which is the western mainline today to New York.
The B&M also absorbed and then abandoned large portions of the competing Worcester, Nashua, Rochester & Portland. They acquired this line in the early 1900s, and by the 1930s, large swaths of this route dismembered and sold off.
Their peak was after the Hoosac Tunnel was opened in 1875, and then later electrified from 1910 until 1946. In the 1910s, JP Morgan bought the company through his New Haven Railroad so the B&M was now under New Haven control. This lasted until the panic of 1916 and JP Morgan lost everything, and sold off the B&M and other assets in order to raise cash. He put the B&M into bankruptcy and many lines were abandoned such as the Lawrence to Peabody, portions of the South Reading and Peabody, and many others. This trimming continued through the 1940s after WWII mostly due to a flood damage when the Bradford to Georgetown was ripped up. The Wakefield to Newburyport, via Danvers and Peabody, Georgetown and Byfield lasted until the late 1950s when Patrick McGuiness took over after destroying the New Haven. He actually got caught due to shady dealings and went to jail for stock fraud. He put the B&M into bankruptcy and that lasted until the late 1970s, and eventually Guilford took over in the 1980s. GTI continued it's swath of ripping up and discouraging business on branches because they wanted to run mainline operations and not bother with feeder lines.
This happened all over the region, and not just to the B&M, in part because industry moved away. We lost our textiles in the 1950s and 1960s, to be followed by shoes in the 1960s and 1970s, and later other industries, which either closed or moved away. The railroads also couldn't compete with the new Interstate which opened up in the 1960s, and the trucking industry had the advantages over the railroads. We lost the Manchester and Lawrence, the Manchester and Portsmouth, and many, many other lines including important ones such as the Concord to White River Junction.
I know it's sad, but that's the way it is. In some cases I look at with a why did they rip up that line just because, then I look at how I could restore it, which is possible in Trainz using Trans DEM.
