Railroads will rid themselves of any track that is no longer profitable. Class I's are going away from local switching to long haul. Sometimes secondary lines are sold to shortlines but lines with zero freight customers are usually abandoned and sometimes ripped up. They save on taxes because they have to pay taxes on track whether it's used or not. Same for trackside buildings. 1980 was the year of deregulation, the Staggers Rail Act and railroads like Conrail started abandoning and ripping up unprofitable or redundant track. In my area there were some former LV and CNJ lines that were ripped up because CNJ pulled out of PA in 1972 and LV took over some CNJ lines then Conrail eliminated duplicate trackage. It's all about profitability and cutting costs for the big guys. There were a lot of abandonments in New England and Guilford Transportation Industries was badly run, and Pan Am probably as well.
That's right because even though the railroads pay all these taxes, they don't receive any kind of subsidies to continue business and the taxes they pay go to competitive transportation such as trucks and highways. Conrail cut the Lowell to Framingham because that line was out of their operating territory. Instead of encouraging a short line or even the B&M to take over the line, they lopped it off 2 miles from the junction in Lowell with the B&M at Metacross Street. As I said, I remember the long freights running between the two cities and that was a cutoff that moved freight out of the western suburbs to the north without having to go through Boston and around.
Pan Am was Guilford with a different name. The company changed name when Guilford purchased the Pan Am Airways name and logo with hopes of running an airline. They did do it very briefly, but the service was shut down by the FAA because of unsafe equipment. Given how their locomotives used to run out of fuel and catch fire, I'm sure this had a lot to do with that decision! As far as running a railroad, they continued their bad business practices and the good news is they are no longer and have been absorbed into CSX. CSX has put millions of dollars into rebuilding the lines and encouraging business. It's a long haul ahead and hopefully they can bring what's left of the system back from the brink. That said, unlike Guilford and Pan Am, CSX is looking to spin-off a number of branch lines to short lines and most likely state governments. Guilford instead ripped up the track and sold off the land for profit to developers and telecom companies.
The Central Mass branch had been declining for years, and the B&M was in too poor a condition itself to be able to keep up with the maintenance on it. When Guilford took over, they did what Guilford did and discouraged any remaining business left including from the bigger industries located in Hudson located at the end of the track. Even if Guilford or Pan Am kept the line active, they would've deferred maintenance on it to a point where the tracks and ROW would be in the same state they were when the B&M was running it. They did this to two busy branches located in my area. One of them had a number of industries on it and managed to have a daily local on the line 5-days a week until the very end when Guilford decided to defer maintenance on a good portion of it causing a washout. After the washout, they used that as an excuse to kill the line.
On another line, they performed zero maintenance, even though that line saw a local 3 times a week, to a point that trees were growing up through the tracks. When a sapling punctured a fuel tank on a locomotive, they petitioned to abandon the line after forcing the customers to pick-up the tab for the track rehab if they wanted service.
Today, both lines are rail trails, and I wouldn't ride a bike on the first one due to its unsafe route. Riding through North Lawrence is, to be blunt about it, like riding through North Philadelphia or parts of Passaic, NJ. It's bad in a car and can be, as you can imagine, deadly on a bike.
