Tales of the Rails - NAB/RR
Tales of the Rails- NAB/RR
Although difficult to believe, Dunstable had two railway systems running through it delivering passengers and freight to stations along the way. The first was the Nashua, Acton, Boston Railroad linking Nashua, Dunstable, Groton, Westford, Littleton, Ayer and Acton with six stops along the way. Building started on this system in December 1871 and just 19 months later, trains were running along its twenty-one mile route. Land could be purchased or leased inexpensively, immigrant labor available and materials abundant so as a result the total cost was only $675,000 or $32,145 per mile. But, however by 1922 the annual operating costs had risen to $57,452 while the income had dropped to $1526 and that ended the NAB RR. Although it opened for business in July 1873, it was gone by 1925 and the tracks were taken up leaving only archeological evidence of its existence.
There are still vestiges of the system if you know where to look. In downtown Nashua, Main Street passes through Railroad Square and continues up hill and past the old library. In the square, there are red- brick freight houses, a small single room ticket station, the Layton Hotel built for passengers and sets of tracks that once served the mill buildings. On an aerial map you can see and draw a straight line from the Nashua station to the Dunstable station on the corner of Depot (as in railroad) and Main Streets. There it curves and appears once again as you use it to enter the Larter Field complex and go to the end of the parking lot. You stop but the “cuts and fills” continue along the edge of Lake Massapoag and on into Groton. The effort of building granite quarries, tunnels, arch bridges, banking cuts and raised roadbeds would make you think that this engineering feat would last forever but as you now know, it was not to be.
The train carried apples, potatoes, cabbage, squash, lumber, coal firewood, ice, a few passengers going on to Boston plus even some Dunstable students going to high school outside of town. The late Don Kennedy told me that in the early morning he could stand on the Dunstable train platform, look up the line toward Nashua and see a very faint dot of light when, six miles away on this absolutely straight track, the train was at River Street. As the light got brighter, the engine could be heard and when it finally stopped here at Depot Street, he would be swallowed up by the sound and steam.
The goods were carried in locally made wooden barrels on the edge of Lake Massapoag but the reason they used barrels rather than boxes is a story for another time.