Next station stop: Kendall Square; Kendall Square is the next station stop

I went from North Station to Wells and back and the train I was on had a cabbage car on it -it was the same set on the return. I don't think it was being used for baggage though. I assume they weren't using them because not all sets being used had the cabbage cars. When I made the reservation, it did state "No Bikes", which was too bad, because my destination that day was Ogunquit and it would have been quicker, cheaper and easier to get there by bike, instead of the taxi we opted for. It took about 30 minutes in stop-and-go Route 1 traffic and cost $20 to go the six miles from the station to Ogunquit.

The Downeaster from Boston to Portland is $20 in advance.

AND it's buy-one-get-one-free (if you can find the promo code on their site). Which means you can get a round trip for 2 people for $40 total.

Edward S. Mason wrote a great study of the street railway industry in Massachusetts (https://archive.org/stream/streetrailwayinm00maso#page/n7/mode/2up) that looks primarily at the economic forces impacting streetcar companies up to about 1932.

Street railway promoters (think that episode of The Simpsons) went around convincing the most rural places that an electric (!!!) street railway would really put their town on the map. Most small street railways either were abandoned outright after 10 or 15 years; or else absorbed into larger operating companies. Visit Colrain or Pelham today and you'll find next to no demand for public transit; now imagine those places in the late 1890s.

Inflated costs for raw materials (i.e. steel for rails, coal for power generating stations) after WWI pushed many companies that were at least breaking even into the red. Most of the long interurban lines were the first to be converted to bus lines or else entirely discontinued in the 1920s. Unionized workers who demanded better pay and working conditions no doubt had an impact as well. In the 1870s you could hire a guy to be a horsecar driver and expect them to work 12-14 hours a day, six days a week for about $1.50/day. By 1919 eight hours of "platform time" was seen as the upper limit of a reasonable workday.

The increased use of automobiles played a part; but one must note that auto registrations dipped drastically during the 1930s. The Depression hit all modes of transportation pretty hard. Large city-based operations (BERy, Eastern Mass Street Railway, Holyoke Street Railway, Worcester Consolidated, etc.) held out with minimal losses by converting as many lines as possible to buses and eliminating suburban routes.

One interesting method to preserve service in the face of abysmal balance sheets was to place the private companies under public control. After the Boston Elevated Railway and Eastern Mass Street Railway (the two largest in Massachusetts) started bleeding money in the early 1910's they were effectively placed into receivership by the Commonwealth. Public trustees were placed in charge of both companies in 1918. They never made money again, but at least the free fall into bankruptcy was slowed to a rough tumble.

On a smaller scale two companies were replaced outright by public transportation authorities in 1924: the Greenfield-Montague Transportation Area took over the core (and financially salvageable) part of the Connecticut Valley Street Railway; similarly the Athol & Orange TA took over the only profitable part of the Northern Massachusetts Street Railway. Running streetcars through places like Royalston unfortunately was never a moneymaker.

WWII offered a brief recovery, but the 1950's American Dream of a house in the suburbs with a nice Chevy or Ford in the driveway effectively wiped out all but the few city-based systems we have today. It wouldn't be until the creation of regional transit authorities in the 1970s that some of the lost service was restored.

That's about it in a nutshell.