by railfan1988
alexander wrote:There was a lone Guilford GP40 parked light between US 1 and Lowell St. one evening in December 1997, IIRC. This may have been the evening after a grade crossing accident occurred on US 1 and could have been the last movement on the Newburyport Branch beyond Wakefield Industrial Park. I saw it from I-95 while driving north that night. I got off the highway onto US 1 and went into that parking lot behind the Hallmark building to get a closer look. I remember thinking that I wished it wasn't dark and that I wished I had a camera. There's nothing there now.After doing extensive research on this subject, I learned that the Route 1 grade crossing accident happened on September 19, 1996. According to an old Salem News article I found, the train was crossing the northbound side of Route 1, when a 79 year-old Peabody resident drove his car right into it. The train pushed the car as far as the southbound side of the highway. The driver was critically injured and ended up being flown to Boston Medical Center (a Med-Flight helicopter landed right on Route 1 to take him away). So it would be interesting to find out why this lone Guilford GP40 locomotive was sitting between Route 1 and Lowell Street on that night in December of 1997. I've been told that there was at least one collision at the Lowell Street crossing, after the Route 1 accident, so maybe it was the night after that happened.
