History
The depot opened in 1894 as Union Station at the junction of the Fitchburg Railroad and Old Colony Railroad, in a section of Concord that was initially called Concord Junction. Eventually, the name of the station stop, and the section of town, was renamed West Concord. Both railroads were eventually merged into other railroad companies to create larger networks. The Fitchburg Railroad became part of the Boston and Maine Railroad in 1900 while the Old Colony Railroad was absorbed into the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. Regular passenger service on the New Haven Railroad portion of the line ceased in 1930s.
The depot is now owned by the MBTA, which purchased the passenger operations of the Boston & Maine Railroad in 1976. The building houses an MBTA office, a restaurant, and a waiting room for morning rail passengers.
West Concord Depot is a Queen Anne Style building which was entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. As of 2007, local residents and businesses along with the Town of Concord and the MBTA were working to restore the station exterior after years of decay. The original railroad diamond is located in the bricks on the former right-of-way of the New Haven Railroad's Lowell Secondary Line between Framingham and Lowell, Massachusetts. This right-of-way is scheduled to become the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail.
Currently, the building holds the Club Car Cafe restaurant.
Read more about this topic: West Concord Depot
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)