Lexington Branch

            The first part of what eventually became the Boston and Maine Railroad’s Lexington Branch was the 6.6-mile Lexington & West Cambridge Railroad. The rural towns of West Cambridge (renamed Arlington in 1867) and Lexington were among those bypassed by the pioneering Boston & Lowell Railroad, which began operation in 1835. It was clear by the 1840s that the new technology of iron-wheeled vehicles on iron rails was revolutionizing land transportation, giving the creation of a local railroad a certain urgency among citizens of the two towns. Making their project affordable (barely) was the completion of the Fitchburg Railroad from Charlestown to Fitchburg in 1845. A point on the Fitchburg called Brick Yards, 4.4 miles from Boston and just south of today’s Alewife subway station, was only 1.9 miles from the center of West Cambridge. Money was raised locally and after a year of construction, the L&WC opened from Brick Yards to Lexington in August 1846. It initially offered three daily Lexington-Boston round trips, which it eventually increased to five and one-half (with an extra inbound).

            At first, the Lexington & West Cambridge (renamed Lexington & Arlington in 1867) was leased by the Fitchburg and operated using that company’s equipment. Having acquired some used engines and cars in 1857, the L&WC/L&A ran its own trains thereafter. Although certainly an improvement over stagecoaches and freight wagons, the little railroad disappointed both investors and passengers. In most years the company failed to pay dividends. It and the Fitchburg were often at odds, and the unreliable service that resulted limited passenger revenue. After 1857, the L&WC/L&A was unable to operate through trains to and from Boston. Each trip was interrupted at Brick Yards until connecting Fitchburg trains arrived to pick up passenger cars left there. Freight revenue was never enough to support the railroad on its own. As a result of limited income and rapidly growing costs, by the end of the Civil War the company was failing.

            The Boston & Lowell’s purchase of the Lexington & Arlington in December 1869 began a dramatic turnaround. The B&L had come to see the part of Middlesex County between itself and the Fitchburg, penetrated just by the little L&A, as ripe with opportunity. It immediately (in 1870) relocated the Boston end of its acquisition by building a little over two miles of track from East Arlington to its Lowell main line at Somerville Junction. Bypassing Brick Yards allowed it to provide through service to Boston entirely on its own rails and, of course, take the Branch traffic away from the rival Fitchburg. By 1871 it was operating eight daily round trips.

            The B&L then created a subsidiary, the Middlesex Central Railroad, to extend the railroad 8.0 miles from Lexington to Concord, via Bedford. Concord-Boston service with eight daily round trips began in August 1873. The number of trains had not increased but the distance they covered almost doubled (19.0 miles from Boston to Concord vs. 11.0 miles from Boston to Lexington). In 1879 the Middlesex Central built an additional 2.6 miles to what would be called Reformatory (next to today’s Concord state prison) and 0.5 miles beyond that to Middlesex Junction. It connected there with the Framingham & Lowell Railroad. The B&L’s hopes to develop profitable through traffic with the F&L’s tenant, the Nashua, Acton & Boston Railroad, were mostly unrealized.

            Changes in residential and work patterns in the “Minuteman towns” were noticeable by the 1870s and in time would accelerate. As the area gradually transformed from rural to suburban, passenger traffic grew. In 1877, service to the more populous towns nearer Boston was selectively increased by adding round trips that covered only part of the line. By 1884, Arlington had 18 daily round trips, Lexington 14, and Bedford 9. The branch had entered a golden era that would last until about 1900. Concord, which was served also by the double-track Fitchburg main line, was the exception to the increase in service. It went from 8 round trips via the Middlesex Central in 1873 to 5 in 1884.

             The 1880s brought major changes in the infrastructure. In 1883 Bedford became an engine terminal, replacing Concord. In May 1885 the Boston & Lowell (which had absorbed the Middlesex Central in 1883) opened an 8.1-mile line from Bedford to North Billerica, giving the branch a Y-shape. That extension reused most of the right-of-way of the two-foot narrow gauge Billerica & Bedford Railroad, which had been abandoned in 1878. The junction switch was just south of the Bedford depot. The Concord and Billerica forks would eventually be called the Reformatory Branch and Bedford & Billerica Branch, respectively, but for practical purposes they were simply part of the Lexington Branch. Traffic grew enough for the B&L to justify completing a second track between Somerville Junction and Lexington in 1886.

            In 1887 the Boston & Maine leased the B&L system and thereby assumed control of what would be its Lexington Branch. During the first two decades of B&M operation, improvements in infrastructure and operations continued. At the peak of passenger service in 1900, there were 29 daily round trips for Arlington, 21 for Lexington, 13 for Bedford, 7 for Concord and Reformatory, and 5 for Lowell via Billerica. Including the local freight that made its own round trip from Boston, at least 60 steam trains daily operated as far as Arlington. Over an 18-hour operating day, that is an average of one train every 20 minutes!

            During the railroad’s first half-century, no other conveyance to Boston went faster than a horse could trot. Although in 1859 the West Cambridge Horse Railroad began providing another option for residents of what would become Arlington, serious competition did not arrive until 1900. That is when the Lexington & Boston Street Railway began electric trolley service over routes that closely paralleled the Lexington Branch. The trolleys were cheap, ran as little as 15 minutes apart during peak periods, and soon became a major factor in local travel. By 1915, the number of weekday trains serving Arlington and Lexington had each been cut in half, although service to Bedford was only slightly reduced. Travel from the outlying stations to Boston was affected less because the trolleys, although faster than horsecars, could not match the speed of trains. 

            The most serious, and ultimately fatal, threat to the Lexington Branch was the private automobile. The rapid increase in automobile ownership after World War I was accompanied by the paving of more and more roads. A major round of passenger service cuts on the Lexington Branch came in 1926, when the number of daily round trips from Arlington, Lexington, and Bedford was reduced to five, that from Lowell via Billerica was cut to one, and service to Concord was discontinued. The trackage from Concord to Reformatory was abandoned in 1927, although that between Bedford and Concord was retained for freight service. Starting in 1933, the line from Bedford to North Billerica also became freight-only. Thereafter, all passenger trains on the Lexington Branch originated or terminated in Bedford. Street railways were not immune to the challenge from motor vehicles. The Middlesex & Boston Street Railway, successor (since 1912) to the Lexington & Boston, discontinued its trolley service on the L&B routes in 1924, substituting buses.

            As part of a major revamping of the B&M’s Boston terminal, in 1927 the south end of the Lexington Branch was moved back to where it connected with the Fitchburg in 1846–70. (The Fitchburg Railroad had been absorbed by the B&M in 1900.) The junction formerly called Brick Yards was renamed Fens. Also, in 1927, the second track to Lexington was taken out of service. The trackage from North Cambridge to Somerville Junction that all trains of the Lexington and Central Massachusetts Branches had been sharing since the 1880s became part of a freight-only cutoff to Boston.

            The daily number of passenger trains on the Lexington Branch remained constant, at five round trips, during the Great Depression and World War II. Gasoline and tire rationing during the war discouraged automobile use and stimulated ridership on all forms of public transport. However, by the postwar years the passenger service that had once made the Lexington Branch profitable had become its greatest liability. Consistent with national trends, revenues on the Boston & Maine’s commuter routes had failed to keep pace with rising costs. The unusually large fraction of its business that involved commuters made the B&M particularly vulnerable to the growing deficits from such services.

            To improve its operational efficiency and at least arrest the declines in ridership, the Boston & Maine began upgrading its commuter equipment. By the end of 1953 it had replaced its fleet of wooden coaches with more sturdy (albeit second-hand) steel cars. At about that time, it also began phasing out the steam locomotives assigned to commuter trains in favor of diesel roadswitchers. The B&M had been quick to recognize the operational superiority and economies of diesels and had dieselized its principal freight and passenger trains by 1946. However, it had retained dozens of elderly, medium-size steam locomotives for local trains. Steam passenger operation on the Branch was discontinued in May 1955, resumed for a few weeks in March and April 1956, and then ceased permanently. The local freight had been dieselized in August 1953.

            Even before it completed the steam-to-diesel transition, the Boston & Maine was preparing for a more radical reequipping of its commuter trains. In 1949 the Budd Company of Philadelphia introduced its Rail Diesel Car (RDC), an innovative self-propelled passenger car. RDCs were bidirectional and could be run singly or as multiple units coupled together. Offered with or without baggage or mail compartments, they were an alternative to small locomotive-hauled passenger trains and usually paid for themselves with operational cost savings. The B&M began acquiring them in 1952, assigned them to commuter service beginning in 1954, and eventually owned the largest fleet anywhere. The Lexington Branch was among the last B&M commuter routes to undergo the transition from diesel-hauled coaches to RDCs, in May 1958.

            Despite the equipment upgrades, the declines in Lexington Branch ridership proved to be irreversible. The number of daily trains each way between Bedford and Boston, which had remained at five since 1926, was reduced to three in 1949, two in 1955, and one in 1958. The reduction to a single round trip in May 1958 coincided with the change from diesel-hauled coaches to RDCs. A three-unit set of RDCs was used at first on the remaining trains, but that was reduced to two units in 1960 and one in 1973. By then, track conditions severely limited train speeds. Whereas in 1911 the 14.8-mile trip between Bedford and Boston’s North Station took as little as 32 minutes, the 1973 schedule (with several fewer stops) allowed 51 minutes.

            Plagued not just by passenger losses but also a steady decline in system freight traffic, the Boston & Maine began losing money in 1958. Its financial condition worsened in the 1960s and in 1970 it would declare bankruptcy and begin a 12-year reorganization. On the Lexington Branch, the trackage from Bedford to Concord and from Bedford to Billerica was abandoned in 1962. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), the public agency that had become responsible for mass transit in the Boston area, began subsidizing commuter services in 1965. In December 1976 the MBTA purchased all the B&M’s commuter trackage and equipment, including the Lexington Branch. The B&M continued to operate the passenger trains under contract and provide freight service on its former trackage.

            Passenger service on the Lexington Branch ended abruptly after a January 1977 snowstorm stranded the train in Bedford. The last freight movement, from Arlington Heights to Boston, was in January 1981. Soon thereafter the Branch was severed to prepare for the extension of the Red Line subway to Alewife, which was completed in 1985. The disconnected track from Arlington to Bedford was dismantled in the early 1990s to make way for the Minuteman Bikeway. That paved path, which opened in 1993, occupies the Lexington Branch right-of-way from Arlington to Bedford. It has been among the most popular rail trails in the country.

For much more about the Lexington Branch and its predecessors, see Minuteman Railroad: Boston & Maine Railroad’s Lexington Branch by William M. Deen (2023), available at the Store.