Arborwayfan wrote:I thought a lot of the Boston and Lowell, like the B and Providence, was built without grade crossings originally because it was one of the early, English-style railroads.
I read somewhere, not sure where, that the Boston & Lowell was built to
avoid what were the population centers at the time, so to avoid crossings and expensive real estate, and to be able to follow the Middlesex Canal. So the B&L purposely avoided the centers/downtowns of Medford, Woburn, Wilmington, and Billerica (Winchester was part of Woburn at the time). The railroad expected to carry mostly freight traffic straight from Lowell to Boston, and
vice versa, and didn't anticipate the need for local services in between those endpoints, and didn't anticipate that
people would want to ride the trains. The business and residential districts that exist along the line now in fact sprang up as a result of the railroad. So I would guess that a lot of grade crossings were added after the railroad had been built as the neighboring communities developed