Boston and Maine Billerica Shops

Built

1913

The Billerica Shops were the Boston and Maine Railroad's central plant for the heavy repair of locomotives and passenger cars, built from 1911 to 1914 on a tract of about six hundred acres between High Street, Pond Street and Salem Road in North and East Billerica, beside the Boston and Lowell Railroad main line near its junction with the branch to Bedford and Lexington. The locomotive shops opened in February 1914 and the car shops that April. In the 1920s, with about 1,600 men, they were by far the largest employer in the town. As the railroad's repair work declined the grounds became the industrial park known since the 1960s as Iron Horse Park, which in 1984 was placed on the federal Superfund list. The yard is still railroad property, much of it owned by the MBTA.

The railroad chose the site, in the words of a 1913 writer, "after examining many other available sites." Its plan of the purchase, dated April 1911 and recorded that May, shows some thirty parcels of farm, meadow and wood land "on High Street, Pond Street and the Road to Salem," crossed by the old line of the Middlesex Canal. The ground was low and wet and needed five to six hundred thousand cubic yards of fill. By the middle of 1913 the buildings were nearly finished and fifteen miles of track had been laid, and the whole plant cost about $2,500,000. The town prepared for a boom. A special town meeting in July 1912 voted to extend the water mains along High Street "to supply the Boston & Maine Railroad Shops with water," and the school superintendent asked the town to plan for new schools "in view of the approaching completion of the car shops and the consequent growth of the section about them." At the Board of Trade in December 1912 a Lowell speaker predicted three thousand employees and "an added population of at least fifteen thousand people." House-lot developers took up the same promise: George H. Hill's Hillcrest of 1911 offered "only elevated lots between Boston & Maine car shops (to employ about 3000 men) and Center of the Town," the Central Park plan of 1914 marked the "Main Entrance to Car Shops" on Pond Street, and the Billerica Garden Suburb was organized in June 1914 to build houses for the shopmen.

The plant was laid out on both sides of a central shop yard, with the locomotive work to the southeast and the passenger car work to the northwest. A commissioner's report of 1926 describes the locomotive shop, 833 feet long and about 150 feet wide, with cranes that lifted whole locomotives between its erecting, machine, boiler and tender shops; a locomotive blacksmith shop 332 feet long with a reclamation plant and scrap dock; a storehouse 422 feet long that held the parts for the whole system; the power plant; a car blacksmith and machine shop where car wheels were mounted on their axles; and the passenger car and paint shops, 314 feet long, where the coach shop held thirty cars on ten tracks and the paint shop thirty more. The shops then employed about 1,600 men and did "substantially all the repair work on locomotives and passenger cars" for the Boston and Maine; in 1925 they repaired 325 locomotives and 1,139 passenger cars at a cost of about $4.4 million. The shop whistle blew from 1915 to 1934, and in 1919 the only fire alarm box in service in the town was at the car shops. In May 1918 a brush fire that started at the car shops burned 575 acres.

The plant was also a large taxpayer. When the railroad appealed the town's assessment of its shop machinery, arguing that a railroad's repair machinery was not used in manufacture, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled for the town in March 1928 (Boston & Maine Railroad v. Billerica, 262 Mass. 439), holding that making parts, springs, sashes and water coolers at the shops "plainly constitute manufacture." The selectmen reported that a loss would have meant refunding $46,239.60 in taxes on a valuation of $1,704,600 for two years, and would have "seriously crippled this town for a period of years."

The shops' best years were short. The national shopmen's strike of 1922 cut attendance at the Talbot School as families left town, and in 1936 the removal of machinery from the car shops cut the town's valuation. The railroad ran an oil and sludge recycling area on part of the property in the late 1930s, and in 1944 the Johns-Manville company bought seventy acres, including the passenger car buildings, to make asbestos insulating board. After the Second World War the Boston and Maine went on selling and leasing parts of the grounds. In 1966 a chemical company planned a million-dollar plant "in the Boston & Maine industrial area," by 1968 the area was called Iron Horse Park, and in 1971 Purity Supreme began a distribution plant there and the Boston and Maine, then in bankruptcy, moved its main offices from Boston to its Billerica property. The private road into the grounds is Iron Horse Park.

Decades of waste disposal left the soil, groundwater and sediment contaminated with metals, petroleum compounds, solvents, PCBs and asbestos from lagoons, landfills and storage areas. In 1984 the Environmental Protection Agency capped a 13.3-acre asbestos landfill and placed the 553-acre complex on the National Priorities List. The town's Superfund Action Committee held a public meeting on the remedial investigation in June 1985, and EPA testing went on into 1986. The cleanup was divided among the Boston and Maine wastewater lagoons (decision 1988), the 60-acre Shaffer Landfill on the southeast side (decision 1991, capped by 2003), the remaining source areas (2004) and site-wide groundwater and sediment (2011), and in 2014 the Boston and Maine and the MBTA agreed in a $4.2 million settlement to carry out the last remedy, including dredging B&M Pond. A six-megawatt solar array was built on the Shaffer Landfill in 2013 and 2014, and by 2017 the site held sixteen megawatts of solar panels.

Guilford Transportation Industries bought the Boston and Maine in 1983, and the company, renamed Pan Am Railways in 2006, had its headquarters at Iron Horse Park; CSX Transportation took over Pan Am on June 1, 2022. Most of the original brick shop buildings still stand among newer warehouses and lumber yards, the yard tracks still serve customers in the park, and in the early 2020s the MBTA began building a dispatching center at 600 High Street for its northside commuter lines.

Operators

Boston and Maine Billerica Shops (1913-present)

Boston and Maine Billerica Shops

Boston and Maine Billerica Shops

Operators

References