Old Map of commuter rail?

[F-line to Dudley via Park]

I was surprised to see Newburyport on the 1976 map.

Was there service up to there in 1976, or was it just being proposed? If so, when did that service get cut back to Ipswich, as is shown on the 1980 map? I had always assumed that Ipswich became the end of the line when all passenger service to Portsmouth ended in 1965.

Also, where would the Newburyport station have been in 1976? And was there no stop at Rowley?

Thanks for finding those maps.

Yes, Newburyport lasted until April 1976. Service past Ipswich was 1 rush hour train only after 1965 because it was out-of-district, with the inner portion of the line retaining full schedules. Rowley opted out of subsidizing its stop in 1967, so that 1 rush hour run ran express to Newburyport. Those single runs ended when the subsidy dried up in '76, and that was the last service past Ipswich until the 1998 restoration. It used the old downtown station right before the bridge, not the new park-and-ride one. The '98 restoration was supposed to go back to the old station, but the NIMBY's pitched a fit and that's why it now stops in the middle of nowhere.

Haverhill was in very much the same boat for awhile there. From '67 on it was just 1 rush-hour train per day covering everything Wilmington-Haverhill, then all the intermediate stops went by the boards in '75 when the towns removed their subsidies, then the Wilmington-Haverhill express itself ended in '76 and the line was totally gone until the subsidies came back and it was restored on a full schedule in '79.

[A320]

Thanks very much for the reply and the interesting info, F-Line.

[theseaandalifesaver]

Do any of the ROW's from the Woburn or Bredford lines still exist? I'm pretty sure the Bedford line is now a rail trail.

[F-line to Dudley via Park]

Do any of the ROW's from the Woburn or Bredford lines still exist? I'm pretty sure the Bedford line is now a rail trail.

Lexington Branch to Bedford Depot is the Minuteman Trail. To 128 it's governed under special landbanking agreement that specs "reactivation without objection" should the T either opt to use it for the Red Line extension to Lexington or reactivated CR. Stems from a 1981 lawsuit settlement about the original abandonment.

Past there it's the gravel Narrow-Gauge Rail Trail and Reformatory Branch trail, which were abandoned by B&M in 1962 and were never part of the T. Stops at Springs Rd. in Billerica shy of Route 3 because of a 1/2 mile or so break in land ownership. They're planning to extend it (can't find many details online other than that's the plan) to fill the gap. T ownership starts back up again at Route 3A at the end of the Billerica shops industrial track where it goes (sorta) active again for PAR's yard.

Woburn Branch is gone. It's been built upon by condos in multiple spots to Woburn Center so is pretty fragmented. North half of Woburn Loop back to Wilmington was abandoned by B&M before the T era and is also chopped up in parts. Never was never a particularly important line after the loop was cut because of proximity to the Lowell Line. I'm just not sure why when it was abandoned they didn't reopen at least 1 of the former mainline stops at Winchester Highlands and Walnut Hill to replace Cross St. and Woburn Ctr. on the branch. Win. Highlands was just a half-mile up on Cross St., and Walnut Hill on Salem St. 1 mile away from downtown on a bus line. To this day it's still an oddly long station gap for an area so densely settled.

[NRGeep]

There was service beyond worcester?

Amtrak ran a couple of daily trains to Springfield Until about 1974.

Also, this map shows Riverside as a stop on the Framingham line. That stopped happening in 1975.

I believe Amtrak ran at least one train well into the 90's on the "inland route."

[F-line to Dudley via Park]

There was service beyond worcester?

Amtrak ran a couple of daily trains to Springfield Until about 1974.

Also, this map shows Riverside as a stop on the Framingham line. That stopped happening in 1975.

I believe Amtrak ran at least one train well into the 90's on the "inland route."

They still do as a detour route. When there's significant enough delays on the NEC and ample warning before departure to re-seat commuters needing shoreline intermediate stops they will re-route a couple trains inland inside slots in the CSX dispatching as a contingency. They do it for things like downed wire where they know the shoreline's hosed enough that half the day's schedule is gonna get flushed down the toilet trying to recover from hours on end of cascading delays. Generally not a big deal for CSX or the T since you're only talking a couple sets--usually repurposed Springfield diesel regionals with a lot of reseated Boston commuters--getting run thru.

[Ron Newman]

Newburyport had a single weekday rush-hour round-trip for a decade or so after B&M service to Portsmouth NH ended. The station was downtown near the riverfront.

[Erasergirl]

I'd love to see more trains coming up towards Salem, but that whole M&L stretch is destined to be railtrail.
Methuen is jumping in on it.

"Construction on Methuen rail trail could start this summer"

http://www.eagletribune.com/local/x1386 ... his-summer

Salem is paving the 1st mile of their railtrail this summer, starting at the windham town line.
Windham is paving from where they left off to the salem line.
Derry is paving from where they left off to the windham town line, also this summer.

Salem portion of the trail north of Range Rd. has been in the works for years, but that's where it terminates. Everything south of there including Rockingham Park to the border isn't in the plan. Or at least won't be until some future Phase II that doesn't formally exist gets drawn up. But that's low on the pecking order for NH's trails priority list.


The Methuen filings need some serious asterisks attached. That one's being pushed by a blog-backed lobby, much like the Needham clowns who are trying to take the Millis line through a PR hot air end-run. This one is considerably more legit than that, as they did work the system with the proper filings. But the Eagle Tribune is getting most of their quotes from the trail bloggers. They're jumping the gun a little bit.

The T has a standard agreement for rail trails (there's a scan of the Newburyport one online, but can't locate the URL). They're a non-binding prelim step where a lot of conditions have to be met before the trail happens. The T has to get 60 days' notice to review and approve the design plans for the property, and the trail/town has to document good-faith effort at formally pursuing funding. Until they do both of those, the agreement isn't in effect. And there is a time limit in the general statutes on funding pursuit (i.e. filing formal grant requests), although as long as they're trying for it they're in compliance whether they get it or not. These types of agreements are more common than you might think because all it really takes is intent, formal filings, backing of the town, and a line owner who can't think of a better thing to do with the OOS line. But a majority of these nationwide don't even end up proceeding to the point where they get executed as real leases because of the whole getting-it-together on planning and funding steps. It's more an "OK, I'm willing to entertain this if you guys are serious" filing. And if they do want to repossess the line for any transit purpose, it's 2 years' notice to terminate the lease...no questions asked, no protests lodged (as far as tearing up the lease is concerned...restoration and/or compensating the trail's a whole other ball of wax).

Problem with Methuen is that it's pretty much all-volunteer. And their only source of planning for this is to have Iron Horse Preservation, the scrap-metal scam artists who masquerade as rail-trail Johnny Appleseeds, come in and do their usual crap job hauling away the ROW hardware, do a quickie raking-over of the ballast without grading down any surface that withstands any rain without turning into puddle/washout city, and then blow town to get rich off re-selling the scrap. They show up with the exact same--down to the last word--sales pitch parroted by some mayor or alderman to the local paper. Every time like clockwork. It's their whole playbook. The trail lobby has no choice but to put all their chips on the outfit that can claim to do the work for "free" and lather up the pols while they're at it, because they're either an all-volunteer trail group or the town that wants the trail is winging it on its own without access to funding. That's the scam. Iron Horse leaves a low-quality trail behind for the "free" job, and in some cases the town or trail organization gets burned by it when the trail left behind has safety, environmental, or maintenance issues that jeopardize the lease (more a risk when it's a private RR leasing than a state agency). The fact that they're making a big to-do about getting volunteers to pick up trash on the ROW as if that's going to get construction started in a few months should be a pretty clear sign that this is a pretty threadbare effort on the means.

I don't know how willing the T is going to be to put full faith in "but Iron Horse said so!" in lieu of a well-thought out funding or design plan. Iron Horse did a generally lousy and careless job on the Danvers rail trail, but that one did at least have formal plans, multi-municipality cooperation, and sources of state funding behind it for the T to approve it and set the lease into effect. Methuen doesn't have any of that, just an enthusiastic lobby and town pols who vocally support the lobby. So unless they can get a funding grant, a well-designed plan, and proof that they can actually maintain the thing after it's built, why would the T willingly donate 2 miles of scrap metal it already owns for usage the lessee has no wherewithal to support? That's the very definition of being taken for a scam. The T is not going to approve plans that don't serve its interests. And, yes, having a functional-enough trail to keep the abutters from encroaching the ROW to death does sort of serve their interests. But that's all the more reason that they should only approve a design that isn't a one-and-done hack and only give approval where there's viable funding sought. The NH part of the M&L trail is a fully gov't-funded job. So is the Saugus Bike to the Sea and (poor design and all) the Danvers-Lynnfield trail who were the other two parties given these 99-year leases on the same day. They've only been approved to be approved. Nothing is ever that easy.


In their support, I would say Methuen Rail Trail is playing by the rules. And they got rewarded with the chance to execute a lease because they played by the rules, and because as a public agency the T is *somewhat* compelled to allow use of its ROW's for public service (much as I'd like to see them put a "NIMBY's will be shot dead" sign next to every stretch of rusted track). Now Methuen has a chance to put their best foot forward for the next approval step. All of this is a HELL of a lot more legit than what those Needham-Medfield poseurs are pulling goading gullible Dover and Medfield pols into town council votes, holding ribbon-cutting ceremonies on an active freight line in violation of trespassing laws, and trotting out Iron Horse as saviors in the local Patch rag saying "so is Tuesday good for you guys with the scrap trucks?"...all without a single formal filing document or involvement of a single MBTA official. On an active rail line.



I still think Methuen needs to be a CR line sooner than later for I-93 border relief. It's gonna become a fully in-district problem in a decade or two, and it's not like MassHighway can do any more interstate widening anywhere at all with how maxed-out the roads are. This would be way cheaper than doing something with 93, and that's the value in keeping it as a long-term CR hold. NH is steering its M&L trail at the state level to keep the towns from doing divide-and-conquer on the ROW. I will be pissed off if the T allows its portion to go trail and doesn't put some stipulation teeth in it about the what-if's. It did so in Newburyport when it told them their downtown path can't touch the Merrimack Bridge approache, so if they ever wanted to restore the Eastern Route they had wiggle room to broker some rail-with-trail peace with the town and not have their rail bridge permanently blocked by some scenic fishing pier. Stipulation that the M&L trail be landscaped and kept well enough clear that they could feasibly do a rail-with-trail in the future would do the trick legalese-wise. The usual Iron Horse scorched-earth job isn't even gonna brush-cut well enough much less do the culvert and landscaping work necessary to re-establish property lines.

Thanks for your interesting viewpoints on the Rail Trail efforts here in Methuen.
Just because it is an all volunteer effort doesn't mean we don't know what we are doing.
And yes our project will reach first phase being constructed by Iron Horse this summer.
and no i don't think they are scam artists and this type of work wouldn't be a smart method to 'get rich quick'
if you think folks are beating down the doors to buy rail scrap, please go try to sell some and then get back to me.

Our trail will indeed be part of an overall Merrimack Valley Rail Trail design PLAN..since you are so attached to the word, but this first phase isn't all that complicated nor expensive. Why should we wait for Lawrence to catch up? IHP will give us a usable trail and the connection we want to the Granite State Rail Trail development without having to wait for the 'F' word...funding.

If all goes as well much of Salem will get moved from undeveloped to first phase development fairly quickly.
so keep watching, you may be surprised at what you will see in 2011.

As for your opinions of our efforts and IHP and...well...everyone else..they are opinions..of someone on the sidelines no less.

[madcrow]

Thanks for your interesting viewpoints on the Rail Trail efforts here in Methuen.
Just because it is an all volunteer effort doesn't mean we don't know what we are doing.
And yes our project will reach first phase being constructed by Iron Horse this summer.
and no i don't think they are scam artists and this type of work wouldn't be a smart method to 'get rich quick'
if you think folks are beating down the doors to buy rail scrap, please go try to sell some and then get back to me.

Our trail will indeed be part of an overall Merrimack Valley Rail Trail design PLAN..since you are so attached to the word, but this first phase isn't all that complicated nor expensive. Why should we wait for Lawrence to catch up? IHP will give us a usable trail and the connection we want to the Granite State Rail Trail development without having to wait for the 'F' word...funding.

If all goes as well much of Salem will get moved from undeveloped to first phase development fairly quickly.
so keep watching, you may be surprised at what you will see in 2011.

As for your opinions of our efforts and IHP and...well...everyone else..they are opinions..of someone on the sidelines no less.

It may not be complicated or expensive but it DOES essentially forever block the possibility of commuter rail returning to Methuen. Many of us here on a railfan website feel that your community's choice of a bike trail over the possibility of having rail service again is an unwise choice and tend to look at people who support suburban rail trails as NIMBYs who are so wedded to car culture that they're willing to replace valuable transit infrastructure with recreational facilities without blinking an eye. This may or may not be true in your case, but you have to understand your audience before you try to convince them of your point.

[Arborwayfan]

Friends, Bay Staters, Railfans:
I've said this before and will probably say it again: The last thing transit advocates like us need is a big fight with pedestrian and bike advocates. If the rail transit people can't be allies with the trail people, we can't be allies with anyone. Communities where lots of people ride and walk to get places are communities where public transit has a better chance than communities where no one rides or walks to get places. Rail trails can block particular rail restorations, but they can also encourage walking and biking as serious transportation. They often provide safe, easy, direct routes between town centers that are dangerous and awkward to reach by bike on roads. They sometimes (as in Newburyport) lead directly to commuter rail or transit stations -- and the nature of the ROWs makes that logical and sometimes easy to arrange. And I'm not convinced that a trail would be any harder to replace than a 40-year old abandoned ROW that half the neighbors think is their yard and which everyone has no tradition of legal public use. A trail is at least a public purpose, a common wealth, a sharing -- kinda opposite to the most extreme part of the car lobby. And rail-with-trail is a possibility on some corridors.

Rail trails are not purely recreational facilities, and they are not supported by lovers of car culture. I've been in public meetings here in Indiana at which the city engineer's wonderful plans to build more rail trails (on grain elevator spur made redundant by a shorter link to same elevator), trails alongside city drainage ditches, and trails on one side of major streets have been attacked and vilified as anti-car, invasive, money-wasting ventures by people who say, with a straight face "There's already a bike trail. Why do we need more?" The answer, of course, is that the one bike trail doesn't go everywhere, and trails are partly transportation; the engineer and the trails advocates understand that trails are a way of getting someplace, not a place to drive to and play. (Even if people are riding or walking for recreation, if they just ride out onto the trail, the trail is serving to transport them to their recreation, and their recreation is opening their minds to bike commuting.) If recreation helps bring in money for transportation facilities that encourage people to live with fewer or older cars, it's good. And if a trail encourages more compact suburban development, it's also laying groundwork for rail-with-trail expansion, or for guaranteed bus connections to trains, or for cycle-ride commuting.

The anger against trails that I see in various RR.net forums shocks me because it is so often greater than the anger against the highway lobby, or fare increases, or service cuts, or any of the real enemies of rail service. Sure it's crazy that Newburyport station isn't downtown; but once that happened, isn't it better to have good ped and bike access to the station? Slightly OT, look what people said about Geoff Ferris, Jamaica Plain bike shop owner; I went to church with him, bought a bike from him, and know that he was about as opposed to car dominance as anyone I ever met -- and here he showed up with horns and a tail for the not entirely crazy statement that South Street in JP is awfully narrow for cars, bikes, and 2-car trains of type 8s. (I'm also kind of surprised that the Rails to Trails conservancy sometimes profiles trails in its magazine that have rail service (like one that starts in Burlington, VT) without mentioning that you and you bike can go there by Amtrak. These two lobbies need to work together.)

I've avoided buying a new car for years by riding my bike from Terre Haute to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology along the former Pennsy roadbed (oddly called the National Road Heritage Trail) that became redundant with the creation of Penn Central because the parallel NYC route has a lot fewer grade crossings and is two miles away. I'm classes as a bike nut for riding 5 miles to work and no one would accuse me or local trail advocates for pushing for car culture. Surely it's similar back home again in Mass.

End of tirade/lecture/plea.

Sam Martland, former Bostonian, current pseudo-Terre Hautean, railfan, bicycle commuter, urban historian, anti-car crank

[madcrow]

Friends, Bay Staters, Railfans:
I've said this before and will probably say it again: The last thing transit advocates like us need is a big fight with pedestrian and bike advocates. If the rail transit people can't be allies with the trail people, we can't be allies with anyone. Communities where lots of people ride and walk to get places are communities where public transit has a better chance than communities where no one rides or walks to get places. Rail trails can block particular rail restorations, but they can also encourage walking and biking as serious transportation. They often provide safe, easy, direct routes between town centers that are dangerous and awkward to reach by bike on roads. They sometimes (as in Newburyport) lead directly to commuter rail or transit stations -- and the nature of the ROWs makes that logical and sometimes easy to arrange. And I'm not convinced that a trail would be any harder to replace than a 40-year old abandoned ROW that half the neighbors think is their yard and which everyone has no tradition of legal public use. A trail is at least a public purpose, a common wealth, a sharing -- kinda opposite to the most extreme part of the car lobby. And rail-with-trail is a possibility on some corridors.

IIRC, If there are rails in the ground, even if they're rusty and unused for decades, restoration work counts as a "repair" rather than new construction under EPA rules, so is subject to much less scrutiny and red tape. That alone is a good reason to keep the rails in the ground if there's any hope of ever getting trains rolling again.

Rail trails are not purely recreational facilities, and they are not supported by lovers of car culture. I've been in public meetings here in Indiana at which the city engineer's wonderful plans to build more rail trails (on grain elevator spur made redundant by a shorter link to same elevator), trails alongside city drainage ditches, and trails on one side of major streets have been attacked and vilified as anti-car, invasive, money-wasting ventures by people who say, with a straight face "There's already a bike trail. Why do we need more?" The answer, of course, is that the one bike trail doesn't go everywhere, and trails are partly transportation; the engineer and the trails advocates understand that trails are a way of getting someplace, not a place to drive to and play. (Even if people are riding or walking for recreation, if they just ride out onto the trail, the trail is serving to transport them to their recreation, and their recreation is opening their minds to bike commuting.) If recreation helps bring in money for transportation facilities that encourage people to live with fewer or older cars, it's good. And if a trail encourages more compact suburban development, it's also laying groundwork for rail-with-trail expansion, or for guaranteed bus connections to trains, or for cycle-ride commuting.

In theory, that's true, but here in MA, things don't seem to work that way. Instead, bike trail advocates tend to be members of the local community who are eager to block train service. Look at what happened in Lexington, for example, the whole Minuteman bike path movement didn't really take off until the "threat" of the Red Line extension happening became real. The fact that bike commuters may sometimes use the trail now doesn't change the fact that it's backers were primarily concerned with killing rail transit in their communities. Similarly, many of the people involved with the Cape Cod rail trail seem to have been motivated at least in part by the desire to forestall any restoration of schedules passenger rail on the Cape. With examples like that being the main things those of us in MA have seen of rail trails, can you really blame us for being hostile?

The anger against trails that I see in various RR.net forums shocks me because it is so often greater than the anger against the highway lobby, or fare increases, or service cuts, or any of the real enemies of rail service. Sure it's crazy that Newburyport station isn't downtown; but once that happened, isn't it better to have good ped and bike access to the station? Slightly OT, look what people said about Geoff Ferris, Jamaica Plain bike shop owner; I went to church with him, bought a bike from him, and know that he was about as opposed to car dominance as anyone I ever met -- and here he showed up with horns and a tail for the not entirely crazy statement that South Street in JP is awfully narrow for cars, bikes, and 2-car trains of type 8s. (I'm also kind of surprised that the Rails to Trails conservancy sometimes profiles trails in its magazine that have rail service (like one that starts in Burlington, VT) without mentioning that you and you bike can go there by Amtrak. These two lobbies need to work together.)

I suspect that rail accessibility of various trails goes unmentioned simply because many of the readers would never dream of taking a train

I've avoided buying a new car for years by riding my bike from Terre Haute to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology along the former Pennsy roadbed (oddly called the National Road Heritage Trail) that became redundant with the creation of Penn Central because the parallel NYC route has a lot fewer grade crossings and is two miles away. I'm classes as a bike nut for riding 5 miles to work and no one would accuse me or local trail advocates for pushing for car culture. Surely it's similar back home again in Mass.

I suspect things are less similar that you might think. The fact is that in MA, rail trail advocates seem to be overwhelmingly motivated at least in part by a desire to make rail-based public transit harder/more expensive to implement. Numerous trail projects (Lexington, Cape Cod, Millis) have a substantial group of their supporters who are more into blocking rail transit than they are into enabling bicycle commuting. Many anti-rail activists here in MA are smart enough to know that more people will be sympathetic to a "we want bike trails" argument than a "we don't like public transit" one, so they use the rail trail supporters as a tool in their battle against public transit and commuter rail. Persumably the car culture types are enough stronger in IN that they don't need to co-opt the bike trail fans to do their dirty work for them.

[Arborwayfan]

" Many anti-rail activists here in MA are smart enough to know that more people will be sympathetic to a "we want bike trails" argument than a "we don't like public transit" one, so they use the rail trail supporters as a tool in their battle against public transit and commuter rail. Persumably the car culture types are enough stronger in IN that they don't need to co-opt the bike trail fans to do their dirty work for them."

OK. Reasonable statement. People have coopted, funded, and even started reasonable lobbies for their own unreasonable purposes for a long time. (The car lobby for paved roads 110 years ago was basically started by a guy who used cyclists as his base until enough people had cars, then sold out the cyclists.) Plenty of abutters and snob-zoners oppose rail service, and where there isn't any current service there aren't many active passengers to balance them out.

Here in Terre Haute (about 100,000 people) there is no hope or even reasonable case for rail transit, so we don't have that problem. But even in Mass, where, as you say, crazy anti-rail people on the Cape and elsewhere want to block up the ROWs, and where some of the people whose literal backyards have the ROW next to them would rather have a trail than an abandoned or active RR, there are actual rail-trail supporters who are not trying to prevent rail service as such, even though they may be in conflict with rail supporters because there isn't room for both uses on parts of the ROW. (Probably the case with some supporters of the Minuteman--the threat of the Red Line filling up the one likely ROW for a bike trail.) Isn't there a way to work with those people, instead of against them? Isn't there a way for transit advocates to approach trail groups before IHP gets to them? Isn't there a way to reach out to people whose vision for their towns is probably similar to yours? Convince the core activists, the ones who really do use trails and want less driving, to find ways to work with transit? (For example, in the Cuyahoga National Park south of Cleveland, there are a parallel RR and trail, and people use the train to make a long one-way trip. Could happen with commuter rail, too.) And find some way to reach out to the people who aren't anti-rail as such, but who just can't see any chance that the trains will ever come back, and don't see why they can't use the land for a trail instead of for a derelict RR? I imagine that all those people exist in every trail movement. Gotta reach out to some of them.

And to erasergirl: I'm assuming that you personally can't imagine trains ever coming back, and think a trail is a good use for a piece of land that you can't really get any other way. If that's the case, try to work with us railfans and transit advocates. Think about being willing to agree to have a RR next to the trail sometime in the future -- if it ever happened, it might mean detouring the off the ROW at narrow places and it might mean a fence down one side of the trail. There are some nice examples of this (such as along the South Shore Line in northern Indiana. Think about connections to public transit. Realize that you have more in common with transit advocates than you might think.

[F-line to Dudley via Park]

Yeah, I think it's important to note that there's a spectrum here both on the community side and the ROW usage side. And also that things are more complex with ROW politics in this area of the country where the government owns nearly all the lines and inherited a very dense web of now-landbanked operating charters from the bankrupt private RR's. Elsewhere in the country where the private freight operators still own all lines and never had as much unsustainable route duplication as here, it's a much simpler transaction. Make me an offer worth my while for the line and I'll sell, or I won't, or I'll sell to someone else for something different, or just let it grow weeds. It's profit, not public service. Lines owned by government agencies do have to bow to pressure for public service use of their ROW's. Not to mention their own management being funded and appointed by a web of local political interests pushing a cacophony of conflicting agendas. It's harder to say, "No we might need this in 30 years." when somebody's working the squeaky wheel to use it for something else now. Becomes a win-some/lose-some game to try to balance all those interests with sensibility.

I'll cite a few examples of "model" trails, and why:
-- Fitchburg Cutoff Path: huge commuter utilization (moreso than some bus lines), urban connections and extensibility to rest of path network.
-- Minuteman: well-planned, huge utilization. Designed from Day 1 to accommodate Red Line subway extension + reconstructed trail. Landbanking agreement (because part of a lawsuit settlement) has extra-strong "restoration without objection" clause. NIMBY's can pull their usual South Coast Rail bag of "build me a sound wall" / "buy me a firehouse" / "give me gold-plated palace stations" tricks to complicate...but they can't outright block it or vote down because it's written into law that they already said yes.
-- Bruce Freeman Trail: major national greenway network link, drawing Fed funding. Couple future-phase extensions away from hitting the Air Line trail and linking Lowell with central CT and beyond. Trail organization documents on-the-record restoration potential and states that it's OK if ROW design takes into account maximum corridor utilization (i.e. rail-with-trail, certainly doable here).
-- Watertown Branch Trail: Commuter utilization and extensibility (link-in to Charles paths, Minuteman/Fitchburg Cutoff network), separate city-designed Watertown Square link aims to re-claim non-landbanked ROW lost 50 years ago (read the plans...locks down with trail easements 90% of the missing center link between W'town and Bemis branches, then sets it up so they can wait out the other blocking properties however many years it takes for them to turn over with redevelopment. Very future-leaning...aims to stitch back together a viable transit corridor where it was once too truncated at the ends to work for either rail or trail.
-- Bedford Narrow Gauge Trail + Reformatory Branch Trail: Protects ROW's abandoned to ownership fragmentation before landbanking statutes existed. Trail maintenance right-sized for utilization (i.e. functional minimum). Tie-ins to existing state parks and Minuteman. Future extension plan strategically grabs last unsecured segment in Billerica, completes preservation of full historical ROW between MBTA-landbanked end points.

What are the common themes here: immaculate planning, eyes-on-prize for the right sustainable funding sources and cost-vs.-maintenance ratio, dense links to existing trails/recreation network, outright daily commuter usage, focus on ROW preservation and reclamation of vulnerable lapsed-ownership sections not covered by landbanking, trail agreements clearly acknowledging restoration what-if's on the record and presenting mutually-satisfactory mitigation measures before the trail is built (i.e. so NIMBYs' own words can be used against them on the legal record).


Couple other projects that are very mixed bag in execution, but have some specific good practices of note:
-- Saugus Branch / Bike to the Sea: Trail explicitly re-establishes property lines on ROW, ends Malden's encroachment war of attrition. This is a corridor that was going to disappear to abutters in under 10 years flat like the Woburn Branch if something wasn't done. Example of a strategic intervention to make an unrepentently complicit party obey property laws.
-- Newburyport / Eastern Route: I *HATE* this community path because it's such a naked NIMBY ploy and the T gave up too easy. But the trail agreement explicitly says the town can't go anywhere near the Merrimack River bridge abutments. You can finagle rail with trail there to restore if it's needed bad enough, but not if your bridge is now some scenic fishing pier used by 2 old guys per day. They almost blew this one to hell, but that clause is a toothy enough legal blocker to keep the corridor ajar for future needs.
-- NH/ME Unmaintained Rail Trail Policy (general): For the rural landbanked ROW's that the states hold, they allow recreational use to snowmobiles, hiking, and (if rails are still there) speeders. Mainly as concession that they can't patrol out in the sticks enough to prevent people from using anyway. A ROW such as the abandoned part of the NH Main from Concord to White River Jct. gets cleaned, ballast re-graded, and opened in "as-is" condition. Zero maintenance except bare safety, vegetation, washout attention...use at-your-risk with no 3rd party liability...no trespassing on abutters...and it's not leased land under the control of a trusteeship (unofficial "Friends of..." volunteers aside) so nobody can claim it's anything but a RR that's "sleeping". Nice and simple, cuts the politics off at the pass, allows utilization of otherwise low-use ROW's without incurring maintenance costs. And, yes, they have successfully restored these things in recent history without a full-on civil war.


Bad to terrible ones:
-- Chicopee: Recent one. OOS line through dense industrial area, reverted to control of local economic development authority. Interested customers, Pan Am discussed upgrades but local pols bitched about more "dirty" industry, wanting more "white collar" office parks instead (whatever that means). Pioneer Valley RR wanted to step in and serve the line...nobody could agree on anything. PAS comes in to upgrade the Conn River Line...to cut off any potential runs at the branch from another operator the city swings a shotgun deal with the authority to sell the line and bring in Iron Horse Preservation to design a trail for a curiously low $35,000. Then rams through the ordinance. Iron Horse rips up the track this pasts winter, pockets way more in scrap haul than the pittance they were paying back for trail construction, and leaves weedy gravel crap behind. Now Chicopee's realizing that the major grade crossings are pedestrian death traps, nobody will use it because they can't cross the road, and there's no money to make them safer. And the trail is a dump that goes through nothing but dumpy industrial property. Who's gonna maintain this thing again?
-- Falmouth: Rail-hating state legislator slaps a rider onto an unrelated bill turning a rail-with-trail plan on the Falmouth Line south of Otis AFB into trail-only AND the state has to pay to rip out all the hardware it never wanted to ditch in the first place. Designed specifically to avert the specter of future passenger service by buffering a short existing landbanked section with a much longer abandoned section so it's just too many miles of NIMBY's to ever overcome. Thanks, a******s!
-- Danvers-Lynnfield: Coulda been a decent one because of all the great preservation land it goes through, but the NIMBY earth-salters got overzealous. This was the only extant rail link outside of Boston between the Eastern Route and the rest of the system, and only went inactive because PAR deferred so much maintenance it could no longer keep trains on the rails. Art of compromise should've leaned trail, but it needed a little protective legal teeth in case that radial link were ever needed. Nope...T fires off 99-year lease to the towns. Iron Horse descends, towns cut them a check to build a cut-rate trail, and they make an awful mess of things again fleecing for a motherlode of steel scrap and leaving a crap-graded trail in return. I've read some local blogs from regular users of the trail. They say it's picturesque but rough on a bike because the grading's all lumpy, and often impassible in significant stretches because it washes out every single time it rains. Who's gonna maintain this thing? Who cares...no more trains!
-- Methuen: A disaster in the making. The trail lobby is a plucky group of volunteers with no design, no source of funding. The town has no source of funding. But here they are trotting out Iron Horse yet again with their sales pitch of doing it "almost free"!!! because they make their money back scrap, and trotting out the same talking points and buttering up the same uninformed city council yahoos. Stop me when this sounds familiar. ROW runs through little more than industrial back-lots, and doesn't really go anywhere special because it's blocked by the active freight south in Lawrence and a grassy dead-end to the north ahead of the state line because NH's M&L trail doesn't go further south than Canobie Lake. It's full of trash, but the plucky trail group thinks it can do all-volunteer cleanup...forever? And, oh yeah...I-93 is choking to death, this came within a T-killing budget crisis of being an active CR expansion branch 30 years ago, and they're probably gonna need it in under 20 years with projected highway volumes over the border. We're not at "Oops! I broke it!" officially yet because this trail lobby is so dangerously underfunded and naive they may not pass minimum requirements, but we're about 90% there.
-- Dover/Medfield: I've written about these jerks at length before. 2 guys with a blog who spam the local papers with news tips about their trail sales pitch to create a PR echo chamber about how rapidly the trail is progressing. Any day now! Even though it's an active freight line and they have not talked formally to any T officials or filed official paperwork. Every news quote you read that even mentions the existence of the trail comes from one of these guys, or a pol standing next to one of these guys. I've never even read so much as an independent 3rd party opinion, much less a dissenting opinion. They convinced more yokel councilmen from Dover to pass non-binding resolutions of support, because Dover has been resisting Millis commuter rail restoration for close to 40 years. Oh, and they even had a ribbon-cutting ceremony with the state rep on the Charles River Bridge. Oh, and what a coincidence...here's Iron Horse again saying it's ready to start pulling up rail and that it'll design a "practically free" trail for them!!! Let's also not forget how even-handed this lobby is about rail, what with their screaming at stare officials at meetings indignant that the 128 widening project didn't design the Needham Line replacement bridge as a bike path (state officials: "What trail? Nobody told us about a trail?). Or tying up the floor at Needham workshops in support of the Green Line extension with diatribes on how light rail is a pipe dream and they should be backing the trail. I will seriously throw up if this one succeeds at bullying the T into giving out blind 99-year lease candy as reward for flouting the rules and being obnoxious about it.


But you get the picture...some combination of these: political corruption, moving so fast to quash dissent that towns don't even think about what they're designing, no thought as to who does the basic maintenance and how, no thought as to what the actual destination of the trail is or what 'sights' it passes, naive enthusiasm overcompensating for lack of sustainable planning, eerily similar nonsensical talking points project-to-project, disingenuousness at possibility of the ROW ever being needed for rail coupled with avoidance of any on-the-record statement as to what they would in the event of restoration, and telltale presence of parasitic scam artists (http://www.ironhorsepreservation.org/). Hijacking the ROW to kill trains forever is a pure means to an end. Nobody motivated by that is going to give a crap about the consequences or who actually gets stuck running the trail. Trains gone, I win, your problem and money not mine, to hell with you.