Georgetown – Bradford railway line

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Georgetown MA-Bradford MA
Route length: 9.78 km
Gauge : 1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Society: last BM
Legend
   
 from Newburyport
   
 0.00 Georgetown MA ( wedge station )
   
 to Wakefield Junction
   
 Bay State Street Railway (Main Street, 2 ×)
   
 4.80 Groveland MA
   
 6.71 Island Park
   
 7.31 Paper mill
   
 8.72 Haverhill Bridge MA
   
 Bay State Street Railway (Main Street)
   
 from Agamenticus
Station, station
 9.78 Bradford MA
Route - straight ahead
 to Wilmington

The Georgetown – Bradford railway line (also Haverhill Branch or Georgetown Branch ) is a railway line in Essex County in Massachusetts ( United States ). It is 9.78 kilometers long and connects the cities of Georgetown , Groveland and Haverhill . The standard gauge line is closed.

history

On March 11, 1844, the Georgetown Branch Railroad Company received the concession to build a railway line from Bradford to Georgetown. For financial reasons, the company was not set up and two years later, the Newburyport Railroad acquired the concession. They had planned a main line from Newburyport via Georgetown to the south and wanted to build the line to Bradford as a branch line. She opened the line on September 23, 1851. The service was initially the Newburyport Railroad itself. The trains were normally led into Haverhill station, which included a reverse trip on the main line of the Boston and Maine Railroad between Bradford and Haverhill stations , since Due to the location of the route on the banks of the Merrimack River, no connecting curve could be created here.

On February 21, 1860, Boston & Maine leased the railroad and ran it. She finally bought it on October 30, 1906. Around 1900 an interurban tram had been built, which also connected Georgetown, Groveland and Haverhill parallel to the railway. To compensate for this, a Haverhill Bridge stop was created at the Main Street Bridge , where passengers could reach the city center via the bridge.

Nevertheless, the transport numbers fell so that the Boston & Maine applied for the closure of the route in 1924, which was initially rejected due to protests from the population and the local industry. In 1933, however, passenger traffic on the route was stopped. In March 1936, a flood disaster devastated large parts of New England. For the railway, this meant the end of freight traffic between Paper Mill station and Groveland, as a bridge over a stream near Paper Mill station had been flooded. The bridge was not rebuilt and in December 1941 the railway company closed the line from Paper Mill to Georgetown. The remaining section of the route was in operation until 1982 and was then also shut down and dismantled.

Route description

The line branches off at Georgetown wedge station in a triangle of tracks from the line from Newburyport and heads northwest. At Groveland the bank of the Merrimack River is reached, which the route follows to its end point in Bradford. It makes an arc in a westerly and then southwesterly direction. Bradford, the district of Haverhill south of the river, is still an important passenger stop today, to which a parking area for the suburban trains to Boston is attached.

passenger traffic

In 1869 eight pairs of trains ran between Haverhill and Georgetown, mostly following trains on the connecting line in Georgetown. By 1893, the offer was expanded to nine pairs of trains, which now only run on weekdays. Due to the competition from the overland tram, the train density was slightly reduced in the following years, but the connection in Bradford in the direction of Lawrence and Lowell improved. In 1916 there were seven trains in the direction of Georgetown and eight trains in the direction of Haverhill on working days. There were major cuts after the First World War in the course of increasing individual traffic. In 1920 there were only three trains going to Georgetown and two to Haverhill. In 1932, a year before passenger traffic was discontinued, the railway company offered two pairs of trains on workdays, both of which were in early business traffic.

Sources and further reading

Individual evidence
  1. ↑ see timetables of the route from the years mentioned.
literature
  • Ronald D. Karr: The Rail Lines of Southern New England. A Handbook of Railroad History. Branch Line Press, Pepperell, MA 1995. ISBN 0-942147-02-2
  • Mike Walker: Comprehensive Railroad Atlas of North America. New England & Maritime Canada. (2nd edition) SPV-Verlag, Dunkirk (GB), 2010. ISBN 1-874745-12-9
Web links