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Boston's last freight yard still sees action
By adamg on Fri, 06/23/2023 - 1:57pm
Nothing like pulling into the Wolcott Square Dunkin' Donuts for a couple of breakfast sandwiches and seeing a freight train slowly rolling past on the Fairmount Line tracks above you.
CSX's Readville Yard 1, just south of the Readville commuter-rail station, is the last active freight yard in a city that was once full of them. This morning, a CSX locomotive slowly pushed a series of boxcars out of the yard towards the rest of Boston.
A sort of stub line still almost connects the agglomeration of tracks around the station to Yard 5, another freight yard on the other side of Sprague Street where most of the tracks have been torn up and replaced by a series of buildings, including a Tesla repair garage. In April, South Coast Rail Videos captured a CSX locomotive hauling what appears to be a giant electrical thing around Readville, including into Yard 5.
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Comments
In decades?
Well, maybe I do not agree but CSX has freight in and out of there on and off. Most of it is moved very late overnight. Freight still occasionally makes it's way to and from Readville from the Walpole diamond. This is where the Framingham secondary, an inland north-south connector crosses the Franklin line. The Secondary runs from the Worcester-Framingham line where it connects just outside of Framingham Center, through Walpole and to Gillette Stadium and continues to the Northeast Corridor where it connects just north of mansfield Station's southbound (westbound*) platform. In fact, if you were standing on th eplatform at Mansfield, you might be surprised at how much freight passes through there and not all of it comes from the Framingham Secondary.
Some stuff is still sided at 5 Yard on and off for movements and you often see repair rail vehicles stationed there as well.
The tracks just south (west*) of the granite bridge is slated to become a staging area for MBTA trains as they expand the fleet to accommodate South Coast Rail and anticipated rail usage increase in coming years. This will compliment the yard off Wolcott St next to Grant Construction.
** (In Railroad terms, all trains travel east or west, even when they appear to be going north or south. So any trains going from Boston to NYC, when viewed on a map, are traveling in a westerly direction fo rrailroad purposes.)
The in-decades part
I think was mainly about the part right on Neponset Valley Parkway and Sprague Street, rather than Yard 1, which, yes, still sees a lot of use (if you drive all the way down Hyde Park Avenue from Wolcott, there's a driveway into the yard that gives you a really good look at all the cars stored there). And, yes, if you want to see weird looking Amtrak track repair equipment, the siding at the T parking lot off Sprague Street is the place to see it.
Amtrak Maintenance of Way equipment...
...has been pretty much yoinked out of there, alas.
Worcester
You can always go to Worcester to see a recently built (TheY knocked down a 2005 built Shaws) railyard in action.
there was once a car haul
there was once a car haul operation there , fords i think , those were the days of a lot of action
Now you’ve done it. You riled up the choo choo enthusiasts.
As you see that just leads to a rainmanesque diatribe of facts no one needs.
F off with your prescriptivist BS
No one makes you read any of it and no need to "yuck on someone's yum".
I am not an enthusiast, but I like to learn new things, so I enjoy the occasional info dump and skip them when not in the mood.
Freight trains > trucks
Freight trains > trucks
On a Boston-based Monopoly game board...
...the four railroads would be named CSX, CSX, CSX, and CSX.
Since its acquisition of Pan Am Railways last year, CSX has a monopoly on freight rail transportation to or from Boston. If you want to ship anything by rail in this town, CSX is your only choice.
In the old days we had the Boston and Albany (New York Central), New Haven, and Boston and Maine.
Go back just a bit further
to get the Fitchburg RR, and then you'd have the requisite four. But ironically, the entire point of monopoly would lead to the winner having all four railways, and perhaps being called CSX at the end of the game.
I'm okay with this
My dad's family was railroad (father at times, grandfather all the time, uncle...) and went from B&O (the oldest US railroad) to Chessie to CSX. So, I ended up with CSX stock as a gift for graduating high school. I never worked for the railroad, but some day, that stock (which has since split multiple times) will fund a very nice vacation for me...and likely seed my graduation gifts to my nephews.