Meriden railway line

There is an east-west rail line that cut through Meriden, CT. Track is still in place. The ROW cuts under Rt. 5 (North Broad) and Westfield Road. The track then runs just south of Baldwin Pond.

See here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&g ... &z=16&om=1

That's a section of the otherwise long-abandoned Waterbury, Meriden & Cromwell line that was active into the Penn Central era to reach the quarry at its east end. Yes, it is quite amazing that the track is still in place under the vegetation.

I checked the CDOT rails map to see if it was rail- or land-banked, it doesn't appear so. Wonder why the tracks weren't picked up for scrap?

Those are the tracks for the old Meriden,Waterbury,Cromwell Railroad that went out of business in 1922.
They also were used by Suzio cement company to haul crushed stone out in the 30's & 40's.
My dad used to tell me of seeing the steam loco haul hopper cars filled with the crushed stone out of Suzio's & past Baldwin pond when he swam there.
I think the tracks were used by the New Haven RR after the Meriden,Waterbury ,Cromwell went out of business. The tracks also cut across Route 5 in Meriden,Ct. just North of Westfield road.

gawlikfj wrote:I think the tracks were used by the New Haven RR after the Meriden,Waterbury ,Cromwell went out of business.

The Meriden, Waterbury & Connecticut River RR (that was its full corporate name) was acquired by the New York & New England RR in 1892, and the NY&NE was in turn acquired by the New Haven via a subsidiary in 1895 and later merged into the NH. The line was abandoned by the NH in several stages in the early 20th century, except for the short quarry spur that is the subject of this thread, which as I wrote earlier lasted into the 1970s, and the Dublin Street branch to the brass mills on the east side of Waterbury, which was abandoned around the same time.

Thank You Tom for clearing this up. I remember my Dad telling me of the Ice House burning down that was alittle North of Baldwin's Pond. I think it was in the 1930's.

I rode the remains of this line on a Budd Car fantrip in the mid 1950's.
We cut off the Springfield Line at Quarry Junction and went west to a
point called West Main Street, changed ends and went east to a point
called Westfield before returning to Quarry Junction and back to the
Springfield Line. The line crossed the Springfield Line on an overhead
bridge at Quarry Junction.
The New Haven Railroad had a switcher at Meriden that did the work on
this line.
Noel Weaver

Most of the line is or was owned by the Suzio-York Hill Quarry, apparently kept around just in case it would be eventually needed. Of course now the line would need a complete rebuilding, including ties, heavier rail, replacement of many bridgesa and replacing the missing interchange at "Quarry Jct." in Meriden with the Amtrak Springfield line.
The same owner paid to keep a siding connected on the former Conn. Central Conn. Valley route north of Middletown, although this was never used for the entire time of the recent Conn Central operation to my knowledge except for car storage by the railroad. This facility would have handled cement and aggregate traffic.

Apologies for rehashing an old topic, but I'm a Meriden-native who has taken an intrest in the history of railroads in the city.

I'm fairly familiar with the overpass of the MWCRRR over the New Haven Mainline - the trestle is still there along with the trestle over Gracy Avenue. However, I've been somehat perplexed in figuring out exactly where Quarry Junction is/was and how the trains actually switched from the Quarry line to the main line. It doesn't seem like there is enough room in the area near the overpass to allow the trains to switch lines over such steep grades.

Does anyone have any insight into how/where this junction was laid out and if any such evidence of it still exists?

Thanks

To access the spur, a train would climb an inclined track that split off from the main line north of the spur's overhead bridge. I believe the inclined roadbed is still visible today. After passing through a switch southwest of the bridge, the train would reverse direction and cross the bridge. I walked around this area sometime after getting my driver's license in 1972. At the time, railcars were still being delivered to an industry that on Google maps appears to be about 2300 feet east of the bridge.

George

Aha! I had been wondering about this myself, and that description makes sense. Now I can put all the pieces together:

Bird's eye view (north is at the bottom of the picture, easier to view): http://binged.it/yB6fPA You can just barely see what looks like a track with some significant overgrowth curving away from the southbound main track. Looking at it from some other angles may help.

The train would have to cross the smaller bridge over Gracey Ave, then make the reverse move to the customer to the east. Street view of that: http://g.co/maps/v2byn It definitely looks like an incline.