How did North Shore sleepers get from New York to Rockport?

eddiebehr wrote:That one glorious summer comment about using WNP to Nashua didn't apply to the Surfside. One or more years there was a NY-Plymouth schedule in 1930s. There were lots of names for seasonal trains on the B & M. And they changed from time to time.

eddiebehr,
Sorry, I don't know the B&M all that well. Is WNP the name of a branch? Does it mean "Worcester Nashua Plymouth"? This is the line through Groton and Hollis, yes?

I'm confused. The Surfside under discussion ran in 1931. (I know, this thread started out with the 1941 Casco, and the 1931 Surfside snuck in just to keep things interesting.) Do you mean there were other trains in the '30s that did run via Nashua City to Plymouth, just not that one?

eastwind

WN & P was the Worcester-Nashua-Portland Division between those named cities via Rochester, NH. Double track Worcester-Nashua, equipped with Style B semaphore automatic signals throughout. The Ayer-Portland (actually Westbrook-Cumberland Mills station on the Portland Terminal) was downgraded in 1928 after the Ayer-Lowell-Lowell Jct.-Dover-No. Berwick-Portland (via both routes) routing was significantly upgraded with extended sidings, respacing of signals to permit higher speeds, stone ballast and some Centralized Traffic Control. It was not specifically the Surfside that I was writing about when I mentioned a one summer season operation on the Ayer-Nashua route. Up until the 1920s there were only a modest number of summer trains to Maine. There was the year 'round State of Maine and the summers only Bar Harbor which had through cars from NY, Philadelphia and Washington. The high prosperity of the 1920s and a burgeoning middle class who planned their own limited vacations (they could only go away for a week or two or so as opposed to the idle rich who could stay away all summer) brought on lots of seasonal trains. They had names and routings that changed from season to season. I didn't look in any of my public timetables to see what the train using the Ayer-Nashua segment was called. By the way, one of the 1928 improvements that figured in the downgrading of the Ayer-Nashua-Rochester-Portland routing was constructing a connection from the Stony Brook Branch (Ayer-No Chelmsford) at North Chelmsford to permit moves to go north on the Boston-Nashua-Concord route giving North Chelmsford a wye. Until then the connection at North Chelmsford only permitted moves toward Lowell. Check out the Lucius Beebe book, THE TRAINS WE RODE. One great Labor Day in the 1920s, 100 plus Pullmans went home from Mt. Desert Ferry station on the Maine Central. Somewhere else in one of the two volumes of that books is a photo a section of the Bar Harbor on the New Haven south of Worcester in broad daylight. It wasn't running late because of a wreck. It was running late because multiple sections of the train were running ahead of it.

eddiebehr wrote: One great Labor Day in the 1920s, 100 plus Pullmans went home from Mt. Desert Ferry station on the Maine Central.

Mostly filled with children, returning home from all the summer camps in Maine.

There still are summer camps in Maine, aren't there? I went to a couple in my youth; so did my sister. My brother worked at one down in Belgrade for several summers, tending the horses. I wonder how all those children get there nowadays. There used to be a passenger special every year up to North Anson for the Devereux kids at Embden Pond. I suppose they come by bus now, if they come at all. My father sold our camp on Embden, directly across from Devereux, many years ago, so I've lost touch. I wonder how summer camp specials would do these days? (I know, I know--PAN AM. Never mind.)

Thanks for explaining WNP. The way the map is drawn in the post-war PTT makes it look like you could draw a connecting curve from Nashua to Rochester, but the dotted line ends at West Gonic and, unlike the line from Rochester to Lakeport, no bus service replaced it. So the impression I always had was that, if there ever had been tracks there, they'd been gone a long time. Now I know that there had been. Thanks.

eastwind

eastwind wrote: I remember those two grade crossings on Route 1: less than a mile apart, both single-track and both protected not by gates nor by flashers but by ordinary traffic lights! I remember thinking, each time we passed those two on the way between Boston and our home in Maine, that there must not be many trains through those crossings if that's all it took to warn the motorists.

No wonder nobody knew what I was talking about. Those grade crossings have been obliterated!
The green line I've drawn was the Western Route branch from Wakefield Jct. to Danvers.
The blue line was the Eastern Route branch from Salem to Wilmington Jct., the route the Surfside sleepers took between Lowell and Salem. I see that this part of it is now the Independence Greenway Trail. Where the grade crossing of Route 1 was is now where the off-ramp from I-95 comes down. I'll bet there's no trace of railroad tracks there now. *sigh* I'll never forget those traffic signals "protecting" the crossings; never saw anything like it anywhere else.

eastwind
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The campers usually did not use the Bar Harbor unless their parents happened to own the camp. Most campers who came out of Metropolitan New York City rode in second or third sections of scheduled trains or sometimes extras. Once in a while a small camp group would be sent in a car on a regular train. The camp trains usually had high capacity older sleepers which had mostly open section accomodations. The Bar Harbor and ocean resort crowd trains were heavy on room space, drawing rooms, compartments, double bedrooms and of course some sections which were hard to avoid in the heavyweight Pullman era. The sleepers that Pullman pooled throughout the USA were moved around according to the season. The Bar Harbor had heavyweight cars almost to its demise; the cars were in Florida service from late November until April. I have two or three years' worth of New Haven RR Transportation Notices which have the line up of camp trains in the post-World War II years. They show date, train - whether the cars move in a scheduled train or additional section of scheduled train - camp name, approximate size of the party, whether boys or girls, destination, routing beyond NH's terminus - usually Worcester, now and then Springfield - and route beyond the NH's terminus.

eddiebehr, I do not doubt you for a minute. Your library is far more extensive than mine.
What I had in mind when I wrote that was this, from Dubin's Some Classic Trains (Kalmbach, 1964), p. 42:

During the prosperous 1920's the Bar Harbor developed into one of the most celebrated railway trains in the land. Separate sections operated from Washington, Philadelphia, and New York with passenger lists that read like pages from Who's Who in America. In addition, the Bar Harbor carried hundreds of children to summer camps. On the night of Labor Day 1923 the MEC turned over to the B&M at Portland 102 cars from the Bar Harbor, mostly filled with children.

eastwind

I stand somewhat corrected. The Bar Harbor usually came over the MEC's Back Road via Lewiston and probably picked up the campers at some of the intermediate stations on the line. It probably had a Rockland section too. Let me dirgress a little bit too. Besides the Route 1 crossings, there was a grade crossing of Route 128 and the West Peabody-South Middleton line near the Lowell St. exit and the North Shore Shopping Center.(This had been the Surfside's route to Salem.) And there was a grade crossing on Route 3 just south of Concord Road in Billerica on the B & M Branch from Bedford to North Billerica.

>>And there was a grade crossing on Route 3 just south of Concord Road in Billerica on the B & M Branch from Bedford to North Billerica.

To digress further - the abandoned right of way ran through the parking lot of the then-Honeywell plant on Concord Road. When I worked there in the early seventies, we used it for short woods hikes during lunch hour.

Meanwhile, back at the topic -

>>I didn't look in any of my public timetables to see what the train using the Ayer-Nashua segment was called.

I have the PTT for June 22, 1931, and if it's typical of the 1930s tables, they're no help. Apparently the B&M saw no need to confuse the traveling public with the details of what took place between departure of (for example) the Surfside (Friday only) from New Haven at midnight and arrival at Salem at 6:05 am EST, or (example #2) the Rockland Express (again, Friday only) departing New Haven at 8:20 pm and arriving Portland 4:05 am. Just to add to the name game, this PTT lists six through trains; the two already mentioned, plus the Down Easter (New York to Halifax, Friday only), Philadelphia Bar Harbor Express, New York Bar Harbor Express, and State of Maine Express.

Apparently, it's going to require ETTs from the 1930s and a few cups of coffee to solve this puzzle.

PBM