Iron Horse Park Drainage

Iron Horse Park Drainage is the name on the state hydrography maps for the ditches and channels that carry water across the old Boston and Maine Railroad shop yard in North Billerica, now the Iron Horse Industrial Park (Iron Horse Park), between High Street and Pond Street. The main channel runs east for about half a mile through the yard, on the line of the Middlesex Canal, whose bed it replaced in that stretch, and joins the canal again in the wetlands by Pond Street. It is a man-made watercourse. The water of the yard collects in a pond and wetlands at its northeast side and leaves through a chain of wetlands along an unnamed brook where it meets the canal; Richardson Pond and Content Brook lie just beyond, on the northeast and east.

Before 1911 the ground here was low, wet country between High Street and the road to Tewksbury, crossed since about 1803 by the Middlesex Canal and since 1835 by the Boston and Lowell Railroad. In January 1911 the Boston and Maine began building a general car and locomotive repair plant here; the plan of the land it bought from nearly thirty owners, dated April 1911 (Plan Book 28, Plan 73), shows the tract between High Street, Pond Street and the road to Salem, with Cold Brook and the old canal line among its features. The Massachusetts Historical Commission's survey of the complex notes that the site, "while generally level was otherwise unfavorable in that the ground was low and wet and required five to six hundred thousand yards of fill to provide a satisfactory yard surface." Grading was "practically finished" by June 1911, and the Boston and Maine Billerica Shops opened in 1914, the locomotive shops in February and the car shops in April, on a property of about 600 acres. The ditches date from this filling and grading. Within the yard the canal is no longer seen: the Historical Commission's canal survey calls it "obscured" from the south edge of the shop complex to the north edge, while north and south of the yard it is still "intact and watered."

After the 1940s the railroad sold or leased parts of the yard. Johns-Manville bought 70 acres in 1944 and made asbestos insulating board there, and the businesses of the yard ran industrial wastewater, sanitary wastewater and stormwater into lagoons on the site. Landfills grew on its edges, among them the Shaffer Landfill, the old Pond Street dump, and an asbestos landfill. The name Iron Horse Park is in the town reports by 1968. A sewer contract to connect "the Boston and Maine's Iron Horse Park" to the town system was finished in 1979, and in February 1990 the park put a pumping station on line for the pretreated discharge of its industries. In 1983 the town meeting asked the congressional delegation "to obtain superfund money for hazardous waste cleanup for the Town of Billerica." The next year the Environmental Protection Agency capped a 13.3-acre asbestos landfill and placed the site on the National Priorities List, and in June 1985 the town's Superfund Action Committee held a public meeting on the remedial investigation of the Iron Horse Park Superfund site.

The EPA divided the cleanup into four parts, decided in 1988, 1991, 2004 and 2011: the Boston and Maine wastewater lagoons, the Shaffer Landfill, the remaining source areas, and the groundwater, surface water and sediment of the whole site. Discharges to the lagoons ended in 1992, and the Shaffer Landfill, which stopped taking waste in 1986, was capped by 2003. The decision of July 2011 on surface water and sediment found that water enters the site from the south and flows northeast to B&M Pond and its wetlands, then leaves by way of the wetlands of the unnamed brook and the canal, with Richardson Pond at the northeast edge of the study area and Round Pond in Tewksbury sampled for comparison. The sediments held polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, petroleum, pesticides and PCBs, the highest levels in B&M Pond and the unnamed brook. The remedy was to dig out about 7,400 cubic yards of sediment from B&M Pond, control the stormwater that had recontaminated it, and leave the sediments of the brook to recover naturally over about twenty years, at an estimated cost of $5.4 million.

In 2013 and 2014 a 6-megawatt solar array was built on the Shaffer Landfill, and the work included improvements to the Middlesex Canal stream banks; the town reported an award from the EPA for the project in 2015, and further arrays followed on other parts of the site. Railroad and industrial businesses still use the yard, and its ditches still carry the water of the old shop grounds to the canal and the wetlands by Pond Street.

Iron Horse Park Drainage

Iron Horse Park Drainage

References