Still Around. You Just Won't Recognize It.

On the front of this post card a 2-6-0 Mogul, one of the main stays of the Boston & Maine Railroad, pulling a passenger train on the Central Massachusetts Division between Boston and Clinton.

Here it is just about to cross the Fitchburg Division main line in Weston, Massachusetts in February of 1955. This is about one year before it was replaced by a diesel locomotive. The Boston & Maine Railroad still exists on paper. This website will provide a concise history of the railroad. https://www.bmrrhs.org/history-of-the-b-and-m-railroad/ I have taken excerpts from it below. The article was written by Rick Nowell, Archives Chairman Boston & Maine Railroad Historical Society August 12, 2016 The Boston and Maine Railroad (B&M) was the successor to the Andover and Wilmington Railroad which opened in 1836. Over the next 65 years the B&M gained control (through lease, purchase, or stock ownership) of the Eastern, Boston and Lowell, Connecticut and Passumpsic Rivers, Concord & Montreal, Connecticut River, Fitchburg, Portland and Rochester, and Worcester and Nashua railroads, most of which themselves were agglomerations of shorter, earlier roads. All had their main lines and branches that wove a tight web of steel through northern Massachusetts, southern Maine, the state of New Hampshire, and eastern New York and Vermont. At its peak B&M maintained over 2,300 route miles of track, 1,200 steam locomotives, and a force of 28,000 employees. The road’s principal shops were located at North Billerica, Mass. and Concord, N.H. Major freight yards were built at Boston, East Deerfield, Rigby, and Mechanicville. In 1955 financial operator Patrick B. McGinnis gained control of the Boston and Maine. His principal contribution to B&M history was to oversee the completion of dieselization, the discontinuance of many passenger routes and runs, and the closure and sale of railroad stations and equipment. Ultimately he was convicted of and imprisoned for taking kickbacks on equipment sales. In the late 1950s and 1960s profitability was elusive; Government insisted that the B&M should keep commuter and long-distance passenger trains running in the face of mounting deficits and decreasing patronage and made it impossible for the B&M to break even. Bankruptcy came in 1970, but ironically it seems to have been the catalyst that the B&M needed to reinvent itself. Alan Dustin (president 1974-84) reduced operating expenses and plowed the savings back into track improvements. The sale of rights of way in the commuter zone to the MBTA (1976) provided cash to satisfy creditors and in 1980 the B&M had its first profitable year, on an ordinary income basis, since 1957. An improving outlook led to the purchase of the B&M by Timothy Mellon’s Guilford Transportation Industries in 1983 and its emergence from bankruptcy. In 1999, in cooperation with Norfolk Southern, Pan Am began running a dedicated intermodal train between Ayer and Mechanicville. This evolved into an agreement with Norfolk Southern in 2008 to own, as a joint venture named Pan Am Southern, former B&M track between those two points, and elsewhere, using NS money to upgrade the track and to finance improved distribution facilities. The Boston and Maine Corporation still exists. Although its name is no longer used the rail system the B&M began 180 years ago lives on in a form suited to the needs of our time.

This post card is part of my 333 post card collection of Audio-Visual Designs post cards. The photograph was taken by "Skipper" Clark.