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Narrow Gauge to Boston by Frank Kyper Boston Revere Beach & Lynn Railroad
Narrow Gauge to Boston by Frank Kyper A nostalgic window on the Boston Revere Beach & Lynn Railroad.
Soft Cover
Copyright 2010
112 pages 10 X 8.5 inches 150 b&w illustrations
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Narrow Gauge Introduction7
1. The Great Lynn Depot War11
2. Building the Narrow Gauge -- And Building It Again13
3. Early Operations on the Narrow Gauge19
4. Boston, Winthrop & Point Shirley Railroad23
5. Heyday of the Steam Bogies29
Narrow Gauge Steam Roster30
6. The Narrow Gauge Navy: Ferryboats of the BRB&L55
7. Electrification!61
8. A Gallery of Narrow Gauge Stations73
9. Bankruptcy: Bucking the Depression85
10. Abandonment and Dismantling99
11. Standard Gauge Comes to the Narrow Gauge105
Narrow Gauge Acknowledgments109
Narrow Gauge Bibliography111
The classic image of a three-foot gauge steam railroad it was not. Other than it shared a track gauge, operated steam motive power, and died a young death, there was relatively little the Boston, Revere Beach & Lynn Railroad in eastern Massachusetts had in common with most of its hundreds of slim gauge cousins across the United States.
Narrow gauge common carrier railroads blossomed in North America starting in the 1870s. The largest selling point was the initial relative cost-savings economy of constructing, equipping, and operating a road with its parallel rails closer together (often 3 feet) than standard gauge (4 feet 81/2 inches). It did not take long for the owners of many of these railroads to realize that the tremendous expense of transferring freight between the gauges would soon put them out of business unless they totally rebuilt and re-equipped their railroad a second time, to standard gauge. If interchange costs were not enough of a strain on the financial kitty, the advent of competing highway traffic made its impact felt much sooner on narrow gauge railroads with their lighter carrying capacities, and led to many premature deaths.
The BRB&L was an exception to the stereotype. Its steam locomotives did not have short mixed freight and passenger trains struggling up steep 4 percent single-track mountain grades. Instead, its fleet of diminutive Mason-inspired Bogie locomotives-smaller versions of the engines that achieved literary immortality on Colorado's rugged, serpentine Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad-had a virtually gradeless, sea level eight-mile run as they scooted with relative ease over a double track main line from East Boston to Lynn, and over a double track loop branch through Winthrop.
Only one leading commodity was carried on the Narrow Gauge-passengers, primarily commuters from the bedroom communities of Lynn, Revere, and Winthrop bound to and from Boston-plus some newspapers. While numerous stations dotted the main line and single branch of the railroad, agents were not hastily scribbling train orders and hooping them up to slow-moving drag freights. They were busy selling tickets, while operators in interlocking signal towers took care of the safe operation of the bustling trains consisting of long strings of wood passenger coaches built by the Laconia Car Company of Laconia, New Hampshire.
Interchange? Other than the occasional deliveries of equipment and company supplies, and an early fling with dual gauge trackage in Winthrop, there was none with the adjacent standard gauge Boston & Maine and Boston & Albany railroads. Instead, the BRB&L's interchange was with its own fleet of ferryboats that carried the passengers on which it depended for its financial sustenance to and from downtown Boston. The railroad's riders had to cross nearly one mile of Boston Harbor aboard vessels that connected its railhead at East Boston with the fringe of the downtown area at Rowe's Wharf on Atlantic Avenue. When this established traffic pattern was disrupted by plummeting traffic during the Depression, by competition from a trolley car tunnel and an automobile tunnel under Boston Harbor, and by the abrupt severing of the direct elevated railway connection to the ferry slip on the Boston side of the harbor by the Atlantic Avenue line of the Boston Elevated Railway, the fate of the BRB&L was sealed.
A dozen years earlier, the BRB&L unintentionally set the stage for its 1940 death when it undertook a costly conversion from steam to electric power on the eve of the Great Depression. What were launched as grand plans for a modern (by late 1920s standards) electrified railway were dashed by bankruptcy, a prolonged "Perils of Pauline" existence during the late 1930s, and total abandonment just as the nation was building up to World War II. The massive bill for the electrification was reportedly never paid in full.
The term "Narrow Gauge" became deeply imbedded in the regional vernacular. Many users of the term would not realize its significance. In some respects, the Narrow Gauge lives on. The former vacant roadbed from a point near Logan International Airport in East Boston to Wonderland in Revere had standard gauge track relaid on it a decade-and one war-after the slim gauge rails were lifted. The trolley line under Boston Harbor that cut into the BRB&L's business was converted in 1916 to a high level platform rapid transit line, and its rails were extended in the early 1950s to meet and occupy the Narrow Gauge's corridor. A wye track, shops building, and car storage yard were built by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) where the BRB&L's Winthrop Branch diverged from the main line at Orient Heights. Today, with modern electric rail rapid transit equipment, the Blue Line of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or "T") provides train service every few minutes from downtown Boston to East Boston and Revere.
The Boston, Revere Beach & Lynn died a few months before I was born, less than 35 air miles from East Boston. My baptism into narrow gauge railroading was by a more circuitous route. My father, a minister serving his first parish when I was born, was raised in Mount Union, Pennsylvania, less than two blocks from the enginehouse of the three-foot gauge East Broad Top Railroad.
I first rode the East Broad Top in 1948-aboard one of the two narrow gauge combination baggage-passenger cars the EBT purchased from the BRB&L in 1916. The BRB&L initials are clearly visible today on the truck frames. You can still ride in these cars, as well as in a full coach, also a BRB&L veteran, which was "modernized" in 1927 by changing out the friction bearing trucks for roller bearing wheelsets for use behind the EBT's Brill-Westinghouse gas-electric car. After regular train operations on the EBT ceased in 1956, a short segment of the railroad was reopened as a tourist or recreational railroad in 1960. Its summertime steam trains run to this day-a delightful throwback to a much earlier era of antiquated twentieth century railroading.
Many of my teenage years were split between New England and southern Pennsylvania. While I had plenty of time to watch the East Broad Top Railroad as it went through death throes as a common carrier and started its second life as a tourist railroad, I knew of the former existence of the BRB&L, but little else. This started to change when I attended college in Boston during the early 1960s. On several occasions, I rode the orange and cream PCC trolleys of the then-Metropolitan Transit Authority through what is now the Green Line trolley subway to the old Scollay Square station. Above ground, Scollay Square was the risque (for that era) section of Boston until it was bulldozed in the mid 1960s to make way for today's Government Center complex. But my objective was the second, lower level of subway tracks under Scollay Square, where today's Blue Line heads underneath Boston Harbor to East Boston and beyond.
In September 1962, I rode to Wonderland station at the end of the then-MTA, and hiked the still-very-visible vacant BRB&L roadbed to Lynn. The concrete stumps of the overhead electric supports of the expensive 1927 electrification punctuated each side of the roadbed every few hundred feet. A fuel pipeline was buried under the roadbed. At Point of Pines, the roadbed ducked under the North Shore Road approach to the General Edwards Bridge, and then took off across the Saugus River on a still-existing wood pile trestle-with the drawbridge structure missing in the middle. On the north side of the river, the roadbed, now paved as a busway for the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway (which gave up its last flanged wheels in 1948), skirted the massive General Electric River Works as it continued toward downtown Lynn. I was a tired railfan when I boarded a Boston & Maine Budd RDC Highliner at Lynn for the ride to Boston's North Station.
My belated courtship with the BRB&L continued on and off over the next four decades. From 1968 to 1970, I was an executive in the Public Relations Department of the Massachusetts Port Authority. This brought me into close contact with the neighborhoods that bordered Logan Airport. The empty twin railway tunnels with granite-lined portals through the ridge that separated the East Boston waterfront from the highway approaches to the airport were still very prominent. Despite lingering doubts about agency responsibility for them, Massport sealed off the north portals with a chain link fence about 1969. The same portals were buried under fill in later years. Today, much of Logan Airport and the surrounding area are unrecognizable from what they were in the 1960s.
In 1969, in a skirmish that rivaled some of the best, if not necessarily honorable, moments in Boston political history, Massport used a contingent of Massachusetts state troopers to seize the vacant stub of Neptune Road in East Boston from the City of Boston to make way for airport expansion. After the momentary fracas died down, I was surprised to discover that the east end of Neptune Road then ended atop the remaining west abutment of a bridge that had once spanned the now-vacant Narrow Gauge roadbed a quarter mile or less south of where the Blue Line of the MBTA "swings over" via an S-curve onto the BRB&L roadbed.
Shortly after I completed a book on random railroading in the Boston area and was wrapping up co-authoring the definitive hard cover book on the East Broad Top Railroad, I acquired a substantial collection of photographic negatives of the BRB&L. Not too long after this, I spent a number of enjoyable Saturdays with the late Harold Walker at the Lynn Historical Society as he reminisced about the Narrow Gauge. Harold had ridden the Narrow Gauge many times and talked with its employees and officers-conversations now lost in the breezes of time-and wrote a substantial portion of the article on the BRB&L that appeared in Trains magazine in January 1946. The bug had bitten me, although it would still be a number of decades before the latent effects would take hold.
During the latter half of the 1980s, I joined the hordes who worked at the General Electric Lynn River Works at West Lynn. During this time, I had the opportunity to scout out more of the few remaining traces of the BRB&L, with a particular emphasis on the trestle across the Saugus River, which was sandwiched between the General Edwards Bridge and the drawbridge of the Eastern Division Main Line of the Boston & Maine Railroad. This trestle was maintained, and now had wood planking on its deck. On several occasions, the chainlink gate was left open, and I was able to walk out on the northern portion of the trestle to the gaping break for the navigation channel that had been occupied by the Narrow Gauge drawbridge.
Numerous times over the years, the transit authority listed an extension of its Blue Line rapid transit tracks beyond Wonderland to Lynn in its expansion plans. For inexplicable reasons, it has never bubbled high enough up on the "to do" list to progress beyond political elocution. Who knows? Perhaps someday we will be able to ride the "T" Blue Line trains all the way from Boston's Government Center into downtown Lynn. No such similar plans seem to exist for the vacant roadbed of the BRB&Ls loop branch through Winthrop, although the stub connection to it at Orient Heights is now occupied by the primary shops and storage yard for the Blue Line. I wonder what an archaeological dig under this site would unearth?
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