I saw some pictures of Plainville there. I lived less than a mile away. At the time my grandfather ran a trucking company. One of his biggest accounts was a furniture broker. He leased the freight house to transload boxcars of furniture from the south to the trucks. The railroad still used the office portion for the yard office.
I was occasionally arranged rides on the switch engines. I know they were RS3s due to the body style. Some were later rebuilt with EMDs, I'm sure.
The Plainville shots show Route 72 under construction. I remember that because some local streets were divided. I also remember waking up to the banging of the pile drivers, since that area has lots of wetlands.
One day a friend and I biked down to the yard. My grandmother gave me the job of bringing my grandfather his lunch. I spotted a boxcar on fire down in the yard. It was a car of newsprint. We naturally watched the fire department put it out, as one of my uncles was a firefighter. On the way home we encountered a railroad cop, while leaving the yard. He asked if we knew what had happed. I told him that I had discovered the fire, and why we were there. The d!¢k still made us turn out our pockets to see if we had matches. My grandfather later told me that he set the cop straight. I was supervised and wouldn't do something like that.
Not too much later, in about 1982 the B&M took over.
