Old rail yard in Brockton, Ma

It's northeast of the current Brockton Station. Anyone know any history of it?
http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v ... &encType=1

As you probably figured, that was the New Haven RR's Brockton yard, and also the site of its freight station, which was on the north side of that big empty space. The yard was located at ground level, rather than being elevated like the mainline. In the late 1960s it was home to an NH RS1 that powered a local freight that originated there. The yard was active for local switching into the Penn Central era but I'm not sure how much longer. The shoe industry that represented a good part of the rail business there was already pretty much gone by the end of the '60s.

oh, wow! I didn't know that even existed. Has anyone been over there? It seems kind of cool.

I did a quick internet search and it looks like csx still owns it. http://brockton.univers-clt.com/view_pr ... ies_card=1

Hah, funny, I just came on here to look for info about the place- randomly stumbled upon it while looking up directions for some place else. Looks interesting!

Mass State Freight & Rail plan makes a one-line mention of exploring reactivation possibilities for the yard, but that's more a "universe of ideas" footnote without specific reason listing for the record that it's still a RR property. Even if CSX were to someday outsource the Old Colony south of Braintree to MassCoastal or something, underutilized Middleboro Yard serves all the potential freight needs for that corridor.

I have been there once in the last five years. My brother doesn't live far from there. It is hard to get to and there isn't much to see. The area is overgrown and surrounded by a residential area.

this yard should be upgraded to serve as a staging point for the champion city move. presently the empties are dragged to braintree where a run-around occurs. in addition to paying mbta the car charges, the crew has a two hour waste of time. if a run-around was built on two brockton yard tracks, the move would be simplified to a light engine move to pull the loads adjacent to the brockton yard, then a shoving move to move the empties from brockton yard to champion. ken patrick

KEN PATRICK wrote:this yard should be upgraded to serve as a staging point for the champion city move. presently the empties are dragged to braintree where a run-around occurs. in addition to paying mbta the car charges, the crew has a two hour waste of time. if a run-around was built on two brockton yard tracks, the move would be simplified to a light engine move to pull the loads adjacent to the brockton yard, then a shoving move to move the empties from brockton yard to champion. ken patrick

What??? They have to go to Braintree. That's where CSX interchanges with Fore River Transportation's sludge train and picks up the single largest by far # of carloads on that trip. Plus there's additional customers in Randolph en route. They aren't wasting fuel or crew hours on those north-of-Brockton running miles, they're taking more revenue than they get anywhere south of Brockton. That's the whole reason they combine that Framingham-Attleboro-Middleboro-Braintree-and-back move all into one train. It makes them the most money as a bigger, single-crew, single-shift long run than it does split in half as a two-train, two-crew short run. And they don't enter the Old Colony until the last commuter rail train of the night has departed so they have the whole line to themselves.

The yard placement is excellent for that trip, anchoring both ends of the Old Colony. Both Braintree and Middleboro (M'boro especially) are under-capacity. I'm not sure what customer they could ever sign on who'd be so massive as to require any more storage space than they've currently got. Brockton Yard is a real estate hold waiting for developer re-sale interest and EPA funding to clean it up for a developer. Since the latter funding isn't available in large quantities these days, they're content to hold onto the property. It definitely won't depreciate in value as downtown Brockton gets more built up, so they're just waiting out a long game on that parcel's value whether it takes 5 or 20 more years to score a sale opportunity.

When CCR was built in 2012, the siding was built for a southbound train to back in and swap loads for empties. It is a perfect setup with CCR's Trackmobile doing the necessary switching on site and pushing the loads out near the main for easy pickup. CSX stages empties on the siding just north of the Brockton CR station and in Braintree Yard as well. This only occurs in the summer as winter is slow time for C+D. It probably takes them less than 30 minutes to do the setout and pickup for CCR. And as F Line stated this is on the way home from the money maker of the line, FVRT interchange traffic. Not since the days of the QBT however has sludge ever gone by rail, and only a few cars a week at that. EECX cars were staged in NEFCO's various sidings in the event of a plant shutdown because supposedly the pipeline from Deer Island could not be shutdown and if Quincy could not process it, then well you can imagine. The cars were stored here for years until Cassella won the contract in the event of plant plant shutdown, however I think this has been rectified (thank god). NEFCO ships 3-5 Covered hoppers of fertilizer a week, Twin Rivers usually ships 25-40 cars week of tallow for Proctor and Gamble, McConnell Scrap in Garden Park is a MBCR MOW track now with a swing loader working there last week (I thought they were taking up the rails, have to wait until the snow is gone) and the last Randolph Industrial Park customer, Burke Distributing just began to recieve cars again after rebuilding the switch and occupying the sidings with construction equipment during renovation of their building. I thought they were done using rail, but a lone car was spotted the other night. Everything else is gone, save for Trojan and the occasional Mercaptan car for Bay State Gas in Campello and brick and coal loads for S+H in Bridgewater. Used to be a fun chase when they had a mid morning start from Middleboro, ran north, met FVRT crew and headed south switching as they went. They run north after 11 when the last CR runs south to Middleboro.