• Worcester Consolidated Street Railway Maps

  • Pertaining to all railroading subjects, past and present, in New England
Pertaining to all railroading subjects, past and present, in New England

Moderators: MEC407, NHN503

  by cloudship
 
Does anyone know of any maps of the Worcester Consolidated Street Railway? It is hard ot find any information about it.

Thanks!
  by edbear
 
About 25 years ago, a soft cover book, Worcester Trolleys Remembered was published. 2nd hand copies show up now and then. Try Kevin Farrell at TRAINBOOKS. There's a not too great area map of when system was in full operation. Most, but not all, of photos were of the 1930s & 1940s, but there are older ones. Worcester St. Ry. and Worcester Bus Co. routes generally followed original trolley routings.
  by cloudship
 
Thanks. Yes, I was kind of more interested in how they stretched out into the surrounding towns. Seems that they are missed on a number of the historic survey maps of the time.
  by Komarovsky
 
The Worcester Historical Society and the American Antiquarian Society both have a great deal of offline collections available for use if you go in person. A friend of mine in college did digitization work at one of them as part of her capstone project at Clark a while ago, so they may have some internal digitized maps as well. She showed me a few maps and they were quite impressively detailed for both Worcester and the surrounding towns, but I've forgotten most of the details between then and now.

The one thing I do remember is that the current ROW of Route 12 roughly between West Boylston St in Worcester(northern boundary of the city) and the Franklin St in Worcester was the dedicated ROW for the Worcester Consolidated Street RR. Conversion happened in the mid-late 30s according to her research.
  by Leo Sullivan
 
Consolidated System 1908 -.jpg
Here is a general map of the Massachusetts lines under NYNH&H control
Generally speaking, the Worcester Consolidated controlled all lines east of Brimfield
LS