Trinnau wrote:It really is fascinating to look in the area on a satellite view and see what is left of the boom times of railroading. Google Maps (map view) still shows the South Reading right up to the 128/95 split, and you can clearly see where it would join the Danvers in Wakefield where 128 turns. The Danvers is intact as railroad all the way on the map view (Wakefield to Salem), and the Topsfield continues up behind Danvers High, has a brief break, and picks up again briefly in Topsfield proper along Route 97.
Danvers Branch is the only one that's 100% under landbanking protection because it was in-service until 2001 or so. And of course the South Reading Line isn't even abandoned...it's OOS between Eastman Gelatin and the industrial park at the end of the line, but PAR has (uncharacteristically) retained the unused portion I think at behest of town of Peabody who want the option to attract new business at the park by dangling rail access. The line officially hasn't shrunk any further since 128 was built 65 years ago.
North Reading and Newburyport Branches at the time the MBTA bought the B&M lines were only active to Route 62 and Topsfield, respectively. So those are the only parts with retained RR operating charters that qualified for the landbanking statute. But yeah, there's lots and lots of ROW intact that isn't landbanked in the sense it's still an operable railroad but
does have the land ownership locked up by the gov't almost entirely. The classic example of rail trails being used as a conservation measure on owned but not chartered ROW's are the Bedford Branch and Reformatory Branch rail trails. Both abandoned by B&M in 1962 way before landbanking was a legal option, but now locked up and unencroachable. Bedford trail even has an add-on proposal seeking funding to fill in the last half-mile of trail gap in Billerica so the ROW is completely, 100% locked up end-to-end.
Restoration in these cases is considered all-new service and has more rigorous permitting involved than de-landbanking an existing charter. But it absolutely can be done, and indeed IS being done on South Coast Rail. The landbanked Stoughton Branch takes a small but awkward roundabout through Taunton. The preferred option though is the non-landbanked straighter flank that connects to the end of the active Dean St. industrial track because it's available and a lot less operationally complicated. But it's NOT landbanked because the New Haven abandoned it before the statute existed; Stoughton Branch's little corkscrew move just happened to be the one that was still chartered when the state bought everything. They're gonna use the non-landbanked one anyway; it's one of the few decisions in that disaster of a project that's been totally uneventful and uncontested. Other non-landbanked preserved lines under reactivation consideration would include the BRB&L Blue Line extension routing they purchased in the 40's, still under consideration as the #1B Lynn routing (thank you, corrupt condo developers and Revere pols, for illegally making that one more difficult). And there's a few other minimal-priority but nice to have holds like the Millis-West Medway leg of the Millis Line, the Mansfield-Norton gap between the Framingham Secondary/NEC and the Attleboro Branch/FR+NB Branches, the Greenbush-Marshfield leg of the Greenbush Line, the B&P Woonsocket routing in Bellingham that RIDOT studied for Woonsocket via Franklin service, plus other partial chunks like two-thirds of the Randolph Branch connector between the Stoughton Branch and Old Colony main. Most, save for Woonsocket (file under "if RIDOT's paying, we'll go wherever they want to go"), not worth using on sooner than half-century timescales. But really good to have under protection for whatever our post peak-oil world looks like.
I'd rank North Reading pretty high on the half-century holds list just because it's a much better radial link than the Danvers Branch with Wakefield Jct.'s limitations. It meets the Western Route only a half-mile shy of Lowell Jct...hell you could grade-separate it from the WR and do contiguous Lowell-Salem run with the interlocking consolidated solely at LJ if you wanted. And fact that all of its encroachments are bypassable with the power line detour save for one single intersection makes it a somewhat more urgent preservation case to pull a Bedford trail on and lock up while it's still available.
