B&M 1227 wrote:Agway in Waltham on the Central Mass. I want to say 1994?
1987. That's well-documented as the last use, with abandonment of trackage rights coming soon after. Customer possibly a victim of the Guilford strike?
Unknown Lumberyard in Sudbury was I believe the last customer on the southern end of the Framingham & Lowell. After the May 2000 derailment service was annulled.
2001 was the last documented move, but IIRC that was only to pick up some empties stranded during the embargo.
Also on the F&L was the North Acton Lumberyard, serviced by a Guilford Trackmobile in the 80s, and later by Bay Colony using a former D&MM 44 tonner. The 44 tonner was still there in 1998/1999 when my dad and I went exploring. By that point the windows had all been smashed. I think service may have stopped in 1995?
'92 was the official abandonment. Though who knows when the last actual revenue run was.
Newlyweds Foods, Watertown, Winter 2007 or 2008.
2008 was the last official move, to pick up a single empty. Last revenue delivery of a flour hopper was in Fall '06. Last rail move of any kind on the branch was Dec. '08 when they drove the ballast regulator that had been parked at Newlyweds inbound until it got stuck in a snowbank by the Waterworks in Cambridge. It lay stranded next to the Fresh Pond walking path for almost 2 months covered in snow before they brought in a tow truck onto the path and took the thing off the rails onto a flatbed.
Fun fact: I was nearly hit by the loco returning light from that last '06 revenue run! I was driving across the Fresh Pond Mall parking lot/New St. grade crossing a little after dusk. The weeds were so tall they covered up the whole bottom half of the loco making it and the headlight virtually invisible as it rounded the curve, and the engineer did @#$%all to slow down...let alone stop-and-protect...that completely unguarded/unsigned crossing. More a curiosity than anything as the loco was only doing 5 MPH and I wasn't going too fast on that dragstrip of a back parking lot, but it caught a few drivers heading to Apple Cinemas for the evening by surprise to see a solo Geep come lollygagging through the overgrowth!
On the Freight Cutoff, I believe the westernmost portion lasted until 1988 or thereabouts to serve Dewey & Almy Chemical just east of the Rt 2 overpass. It wasn't until this segment was abandoned that the access road from Alewife up to the rt2/rt16 interchange was built. A small segment on the eastern end lasted until 1997 serving MaxPac just east of Cedar St in Somerville.
MaxPac definitely got deliveries into the early-'aughts. '08 was the abandonment, and I don't think it sat idle for too much longer than the mandatory 2-years-past-last-traffic reg for STB discontinuance dockets.
Lexington Branch still had the produce customer in Arlington Center, a sporadic car for Arlington Coal & Lumber, and I believe a couple more lumberyards in Lexington and Bedford, when service was embargoed in 1980.
It was briefly de-embargoed in 1981 until Town of Arlington settled the whole discontinuance legal hullabaloo with the line. Somewhere on board search there's an official employee retelling of the last revenue move to the lumber yard in '81.
Stoneham Branch, Atlantic Gelatin, late 80s, early 90s?
Per board search it was embargoed Maple St. to end-of-track on the 3/21/1975 bulletin, then quickly abandoned. Track to the gelatin customer was embargoed for track conditions 7/25/1989, and moved to the long-term OOS column 10/24/1991 (termination of the customer contract?) with spiking of mainline switch. But supposedly deliveries stopped for good as result of the Guilford strike. Abandonment of trackage rights wasn't processed until 10+ years afterwards, however.
