Closing of the Boston and Maine Shops

Type	Industry
Date	1931 to 1988

The Boston and Maine Railroad's repair shops at North Billerica, opened in 1914 as the central plant for the heavy repair of the railroad's locomotives and passenger cars (see Opening of the Boston and Maine Shops), were run down in stages over more than half a century. Work was moved away in the Depression, the passenger car shops were sold in the 1940s, steam repair ended in 1956, and the railroad sold and leased the rest of its six hundred acres until the grounds became the industrial district called Iron Horse Park. Repair work on locomotives went on in the old locomotive shop into the late 1980s, but the shops are no longer a working repair plant, and the town lost what had been its largest employer and its largest taxpayer (see Boston and Maine Billerica Shops).

The shops were at their height in the 1920s. A commissioner's report of 1926, printed in the town report, found about 1,600 men at work there, doing "substantially all the repair work on locomotives and passenger cars" for the whole system; in 1925 they repaired 325 locomotives and 1,139 passenger cars. The recommendations on the warrant of 1925 called the railroad "the Town's largest tax-payer," when the town voted $10,000 to macadamize High Street to the shops' entrance, and when the railroad contested the tax on its shop machinery the Supreme Judicial Court ruled for the town in March 1928, saving it a refund of $46,239.60.

The decline began with the Depression. In 1931 the railroad transferred its passenger car repairs to its shops at Concord, New Hampshire; the work came back to Billerica only when the Concord shops were closed. In 1932 the selectmen spent much of the year helping the assessors settle a Boston and Maine abatement petition. The shop whistle, which had blown the North Billerica fire alarm since 1915, was taken down in 1934, and the assessors laid the town's loss of valuation in 1936 partly to "the loss of machinery at the Boston & Maine Car Shops" (see Great Depression). In the late 1930s the railroad used part of the grounds for an oil and sludge recycling area. In 1938 the school committee expected that "the coming of the Johns-Manville Company should increase the enrolment in North Billerica," and in 1944 Johns-Manville bought seventy acres, including the passenger car and paint shops, to make asbestos insulating board.

The railroad carried record tonnage in the Second World War with fewer locomotives and cars than before, and after the war the shops shrank further as diesels replaced steam; the last steam locomotives kept on standby made their final trips to the Billerica shops in July 1956. The Boston and Maine went on selling and leasing its land. By 1959 the Avery and Saul steel company had built a quarter-million-dollar plant "on property formerly owned by the Boston and Maine Railroad off High Street"; in 1966 a chemical company planned a million-dollar complex "in the Boston & Maine industrial area"; by 1968 the district 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 Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bought the shop complex with the railroad's commuter lines at the end of 1976 and leased it back for railroad use, and Guilford Transportation Industries bought the Boston and Maine in 1983. An MBTA survey of September 1988 found the office building serving as Guilford's corporate headquarters and the locomotive shop still used for all of Guilford's locomotive repair work, with the old blacksmith shop moved into its 1927 wheel shop, while the car shops belonged to Johns-Manville. That is the last record found of heavy repair work at Billerica. Guilford and its successor Pan Am Railways later did most of their shop work at the Maine Central's shops at Waterville, Maine, and the old Billerica repair shops are no longer in operation.

The shops left the town a contaminated site. Decades of waste disposal in lagoons and landfills, used for untreated wastewater from 1915 to 1992, led the Environmental Protection Agency in 1984 to cap a 13.3-acre asbestos landfill and place the 553-acre Iron Horse Park on the National Priorities List; the Boston and Maine and the MBTA later agreed to carry out the cleanup. Most of the brick shop buildings of 1911 to 1914 still stand among newer warehouses, and Pan Am kept its headquarters in the old office building until CSX Transportation took over the railroad on June 1, 2022. In the 2020s the MBTA began building a dispatching center for its northside commuter lines on the property.

Closing of the Boston and Maine Shops

Closing of the Boston and Maine Shops

References