Boston & Maine History

What was the peak for the B&M's annual passenger count 'back in the day'? I would be interested in particular as to how those numbers compare to the current Downeaster service on the Portland - Boston corridor.

Did the B&M ever own/lease and operate 4-8-0 steam engines? And since I'm asking what about the MEC?

b&m 1566 wrote:Did the B&M ever own/lease and operate 4-8-0 steam engines?

Yes, eighteen of them that were inherited from the Fitchburg RR when the B&M took it over in 1900. They eventually became B&M 2900-2917 and were all scrapped in 1926.

gokeefe-
I know this goes back to 11-14, but I just now noticed it:

...MEC isn't nor ever was a Class I railroad.

Under older ICC reporting standards, MEC was, at least for a bit, a Class I as well as a first-class line. MEC appears on pp. 131-133 of The Handbook of American Railroads by Robert G. Lewis, published in 1956 by Simmons-Boardman. The book describes itself as "...a single source of facts and information on each of the 113 Class I railroads (v)."

Good point. BAR, BM, and MEC were all Class I railroads under the old standards.

jaymac wrote:gokeefe-
I know this goes back to 11-14, but I just now noticed it:

...MEC isn't nor ever was a Class I railroad.

Under older ICC reporting standards, MEC was, at least for a bit, a Class I as well as a first-class line. MEC appears on pp. 131-133 of The Handbook of American Railroads by Robert G. Lewis, published in 1956 by Simmons-Boardman. The book describes itself as "...a single source of facts and information on each of the 113 Class I railroads (v)."

Yes, actually in recent conversations I had realized that I was wrong about this when someone else who was 'from that era' mentioned that MEC had at one time in fact been a Class I. I never went back to edit the post. I'll leave this post as a record of the correction.

Even though I'm on the record as not being a restorationist I'm still fascinated by the idea of how the Downeaster service compares to the Maine Central and Boston & Maine passenger service of years past. I think its truly amazing to realize that every day now for more than eight years passneger rail service has operated on these famous rails. To think that at one point in time people were fully convinced that passenger service would never return to Maine or that it simply wasn't 'needed' because there was bus service just goes to show how strong the highway lobby was for so many years and also what a dramatic effect cheap gas prices had on American travel patterns over the better part of 60-70 years.

There are so many other parts of Portland and elsewhere in Maine where time seems to have stood still. Everything in essence frozen in place from an era when U.S. industry and labor could best deliver the goods that the rest of the world needed. I will note that given the success of the efforts so far perhaps even more fabulous things can happen in the future, perhaps chief among these might be the resumption of service to Montreal and at some point construction of a grand new Portland Union Station that resumes the mantle left behind in the dust of the last building to bear that name in Maine.