BostonUrbEx wrote:Did CSX (so, post-Conrail only) have any customers on the Grand Junction in Cambridge, Somerville, Charlestown, Everett, Chelsea or East Boston? Obviously they've had (and still have) the scrap and produce in Everett; looking for anything else.
Everything outside of Everett Terminal was definitely gone by the time CSX took over in '99. I think the last Conrail customers on the GJ itself were on Fulkerson St. and Binney St. in Kendall Square. There's a squat warehouse row there that's just about the last scuzzy industrial property still occupied in Kendall, and whatever used to be there before the current smattering of tenants was still taking rail deliveries well into the 80's.
There was a huge thicket of sidings out in Cambridgeport that spurred off behind Ft. Washington Park, went double-track, crossed Albany St., then did street-running through the back alleys of the Albany-Erie-Sidney-Pacific block and down Purrington St. to the back of the Necco factory...with all kinds of spur-lets to the backs of the industrial row buildings. I used to go urban exploring a lot down there when I lived a couple blocks away off Brookline St. from '00-02. All of that rail was completely intact and in surprisingly good condition until about 12 years ago when they razed nearly the entire block (
this is all that's left), but from what I gather that spur went dead almost 40 years ago. Whoever once owned that now-demolished industrial row must have had a lot of pull with the city and self-serving business desire to continue marketing rail access, because the DPW would halt all its cycled street repaving in the Cambridgeport neighborhood within a 50 ft. radius of those grade crossings. You'd have absolutely perfect pavement and sidewalk on Albany and Pacific suddenly fizz out decade-layer by decade-layer into a suspension-wrecking dirt road with traces of cobblestones, then pick right back up in perfect condition on the other side of the tracks. On every street the spurs sliced through. They must've had ironclad keep-away orders for something like 4 decades and 2 or 3 repaving cycles to net the dramatic 'ditch' effect at those grade crossings. Never seen a city practice that extreme a maintenance avoidance around such minor crossings on such not-minor thru streets before. Always wondered what politics were behind that.
