Billerica and Bedford Narrow-Gauge Railroad

Built

1877

The Billerica and Bedford Railroad was a two-foot gauge railroad that ran 8.63 miles from the Boston and Lowell station at North Billerica south through Billerica Centre and South Billerica to Bedford, where it met the Middlesex Central Railroad. It carried passengers and freight for only a few months, from the late summer of 1877 to the spring of 1878, but it was the first railroad of so narrow a gauge built in the United States, and its equipment went on to start the two-foot lines of Maine. Billerica's historian Henry A. Hazen, who rode it, called its story "not a pleasant one" and wrote of it "with emotions in which amusement, chagrin, and regret are mingled."

The line was meant to give Billerica Centre the railroad it had lacked since the Boston and Lowell was built in 1835 along the northern edge of town, leaving the village miles from a station. In 1875 George E. Mansfield of Boston came to Billerica with plans for a two-foot gauge line from Bedford to North Billerica, pointing to the Festiniog Railway in Wales, fourteen miles long, as proof that so narrow a track would work. A charter followed in 1876, and the company was organized on May 10, 1876, with Capt. Charles A. Ranlett of South Billerica, a retired sea captain, as its president; Hazen wrote that the last year of Ranlett's life "was particularly devoted to the enterprise." The town subscribed $12,000, or 120 shares. Ground was broken in South Billerica on Sept. 6, 1876, before a crowd that Bedford accounts put at about 500, but subscriptions and surveys took months, and construction began in earnest only after a ceremony at Bedford on May 12, 1877.

Mansfield was general manager, and Hiram W. Blaisdell located the line as chief engineer. A description of the road published in 1879 gives its track as 25-pound iron rail on ties four and a half feet long, ballasted with sand or gravel. The steepest grade, 158 feet to the mile, was on the climb from North Billerica to Billerica Centre, which stood 129 feet higher, and the deepest rock cut, nine feet, was on the incline south of the Centre. There was one pile bridge 140 feet long, six open culverts and ten cattle passes. Turntables were planned at Billerica Centre and North Billerica, and a wye, car shed and engine house were built at Bedford, but no station houses were built; trains stopped at marked places. Later accounts list the stops as North Billerica, Bennett Hall, Billerica, Turnpike (Nuttings Lake), South Billerica, Bedford Springs, Springs Road and Bedford. At North Billerica the line ran into the Boston and Lowell yard at the North Billerica Railroad Depot. Hazen's description of the old Dudley farm places the line "just east of Ash Swamp" on the east side of the Centre.

The road had two Forney-type tank locomotives, the Ariel and the Puck, built in 1877 by the Hinkley Locomotive Works of Boston, and passenger, combination, excursion, box and flat cars built by the Ranlet Manufacturing Company of Laconia, New Hampshire. The first trains ran on Aug. 31, 1877. The 1879 description gives the opening for regular service as Nov. 28, 1877, while Bedford accounts say a full timetable of seven trains each way a day began on Thanksgiving Day; the state railroad commissioners inspected the line on Dec. 17, 1877. Its novelty drew visitors, and the Scientific American described it, with a picture of its engines, on March 16, 1878.

The failure was financial. The road had been estimated at $50,000; Mansfield himself put its finished cost at more than $60,000, and Bedford accounts give about $71,000. Part of the subscription, Hazen wrote, "proved unsound or fraudulent," and the road began operating under heavy debt, hardly earning its running expenses, so that the directors could not finish its connections and equipment. It was placed in the hands of receivers, and its personal property was sold at the Bedford engine house on June 6, 1878, for $9,000. Billerica, which had paid its $12,000, was urged to give more and declined, and an attempt in 1879 to charter a new company and buy back the equipment failed when the Bedford town meeting voted it down. The Sandy River Railroad, then being built north from Farmington, Maine, took the locomotives and cars; the Ariel and the Puck became its No. 1 Dawn and No. 2 Echo and were not scrapped until 1912, and Mansfield went to Maine with them, beginning the Maine two-foot lines.

Writing in 1883, Hazen observed that "time is rapidly obliterating the roadway through the town" and that children might one day doubt that "their fathers did once have such a railroad and regular trains running from Billerica to Bedford; and that merry school-children went shouting on excursions over the route." In 1885 the Boston and Lowell rebuilt much of the old roadbed as the standard-gauge Billerica and Bedford Branch, and its northern end survives as the Billerica Industrial Track. The North Billerica depot still stands, and the Middlesex Canal Museum in North Billerica added a Bedford and Billerica Narrow Gauge Railroad exhibit for its 2005 to 2006 season.

Operators

Billerica and Bedford Narrow-Gauge Railroad (1877-1885)

Billerica and Bedford Narrow-Gauge Railroad

Billerica and Bedford Narrow-Gauge Railroad

Operators

References