Boston and Lowell Railroad - Building The Railroad

Building The Railroad

The Board of Directors of the Boston and Lowell Railroad, armed with a charter, now had the task of surveying and building the line. They brought in James Fowle Baldwin, son of Col. Loammi Baldwin, who had engineered the Middlesex Canal, to do the surveying, and charged him with finding a gently sloped path from Lowell to Boston, with few grade crossings and well away from town centers. This latter point ended up being quite inconvenient later on. No one had any idea of the future possibility of railroads acting as public transportation, or if they did they were not paid any attention by the builders or financiers of the road.

The right-of-way that Baldwin surveyed did well in each of these characteristics. The path sloped up at a gentle ten feet per mile at the maximum and there were only three grade crossings over the entire 26-mile (42 km) distance. The path was close to the older Middlesex Canal path, but was straighter - as boats can turn sharper than trains. To achieve this superior linearity it needed small amounts of grade elevation in places. The route ignored Medford center entirely, going through West Medford instead, and totally bypassed Woburn and Billerica. This would have to be corrected later with various spurs (the one to Medford being built off the Boston and Maine Railroad), but were always sources of annoyance to both the riders and the operators.

The proposed route was accepted by the Board of Directors of the Boston and Lowell Railroad and work began the on building phase. The road was begun from both ends at once and some sources say that they both started on the right hand side of the right-of-way, missing in the middle and having to put in an embarrassing reverse curve to tide them over until they built the other side. Yankee and Irish laborers were hired to construct the railroad, which was made especially difficult and because the Directors wanted to make the road using the best techniques then known. This, for them, meant laying imported British iron rails with a 4-foot-deep (1.2 m) wall of granite under each rail. They did this because it was commonly believed that the train would sink into the ground if the rails did not have strong support.

The first track of the road was completed in 1835 and freight service began immediately. The solid granite roadbed proved to be much too rigid, jolting the engine and cars nearly to pieces. Repairs on the locomotives (there were two at the time) would sometimes take most of the night, trying to get them ready for the next day's service. The much poorer Boston and Worcester Railroad could not afford a granite bed and so was built with the modern wooden ties. This turned out to be far superior so the owners of the Boston and Lowell decided they would upgrade their entire roadbed to wood when they added a second track. The original Boston terminal was at the north corner of Causeway Street and Andover Street (halfway between Portland and Friend Streets), at the westernmost edge of the current North Station. The bridge over the Charles River to access it was the first movable railroad bridge in the United States. The original Lowell terminal was at the south corner of Merrimack Street and Dutton Street.