diburning wrote:The Watertown Branch had a customer until early 2006 IIRC. Since then, there are saplings (or maybe even full sized trees by now) growing up from between the ties just past the switch.
The track is washed out where it curves along Danehy Park, and has sunk below ground past there. That lowest-lying part of the park near the fence there has been plagued by sinkholes. Every part of the line on the curve until it straightens out behind the new condos at the end of New St. has rails at or below soil level now. The branch stub out to the first crossing wouldn't be usable for any storage under any circumstances. I live in that neighborhood and walk by here every day...it's not just being claimed by nature, it's being outright swallowed by the ground underneath it at alarming pace. If they keep anything for storage it'll be the yard lead which is still in decent shape out to the first ex- West Cambridge Yard switch directly across the tracks from the Alewife MOW shed, before it starts getting a little dodgy west of there (they never cleaned all the tree branches that fell on the tracks after the Winter 2010 storms). The siding into the electrical substation that was used for transformer moves when it was first built is also inoperable now. They ripped up the pavement in the parking lot in front of the substation a few years ago to install some new equipment and pulled out one (only one) of the rails, then repaved the lot with the other rail perfectly preserved in the pavement. Odd.
Like I said...why on earth would they want to retain any switch here when the MOW tracks are all of 40 feet across the way. It's not like the ever use the easterly stub between the security fence and end of track. If anything needs a hand-throw switch it's probably tacking +20 feet onto that siding from where the bumper post currently is and tying that in. I doubt the T would ever want to store things on that side since trespassers routinely get on those tracks as a shortcut between Sherman St. and the park (holes have been cut in the chain link fence). The liability cost for risk of taggers and whatnot is probably too dodgy to bother with that side of the tracks vs. the MOW side with onsite security.
GP40MC1118 wrote:Maybe because the Watertown Branch is not officially abandoned? Or for MW storage in
the future? The plan is to retire W Cambridge Interlocking and Hill Crossing Interlockings
and put a new one west of Brighton Street.
The other reason involves the old Telephone Track, a long track that parallels the mainline
from the East Yard to Brighton St/Hill Crossing. Believe it or not, when the news of ethanol
trains were first brought up, there was talk of staging trains on it until Global could take
them. If this is even a remote possibility, I don't know. Railroad rumor does talk about
Global doing something rail oriented in the future.
D
It's abandoned. All the STB dockets are closed, and PAR sold it to the state last year. DCR did the purchase and owns it everywhere except on the Waterworks easement which was conferred to City of Cambridge. A little weird that the sale broke that way, because the MassDOT mothership owns the Grove St.-School St. segment abandoned 1996 and leases it to DCR for the trail. I don't know why they'd break the ownership like that and let DCR buy outright the rest of the way.
Maybe they're just waiting to see how much GLX messes things up in Somerville and whether PAR is going to have to detour some freight down the Fitchburg Line, suburban NIMBY's be damned. That's the only reason I can think of for ever wanting to keep something connected there (and like I said, it would have to be the yard track because of the submersion situation on the first few feet of the Branch).
City of Cambridge seems to have no plans, BTW, for a trail from Fresh Pond Pkwy. to Fresh Pond Mall on the ROW. The Watertown Trail is scheduled to end about 300 ft. past the Huron Ave. bridge at first opportunity to rope it into the existing reservoir path. They don't want to deal with maintaining a trail in the extremely washout-prone 1650 ft. between there and the Waterworks driveway grade crossing. And the rest of the way along the parkway grade crossing buried in the Waterworks front lawn already has the walking path and the cycle track. My guess is all the Waterworks is going to do is remove the rail so people stop tripping over it at the ped crossings. And then I guess the city is just going to let it rot and collect trash, rails and all, between the other side of the parkway and Danehy Park. Which is a shame because the sidewalks on New St. are awful with all the truck curb cuts and there's enough school kids going to the park that a safe path would really be welcome. But I guess the washout/soil problems out here are not worth their while to deal with here either.
