Been meaning to ask this question for weeks now: what sort of freight service (or any other non-commuter rail, non-Cape Flyer service) do any of the Old Colony Lines see these days? Including the Middleboro Secondary.
CSX B729 runs 6 days a week on the Middleboro Sec. and Old Colony. Departs Framingham around PM rush, runs entire length of the Framingham Secondary, down the NEC past Attleboro Jct., then crosses over and reverses to get onto the Middleboro Sec. Goes to Middleboro, then as far north as Braintree Yard. En route it sometimes does mop-up work for the early-afternoon NEC Mansfield-South Attleboro local if that didn't finish its chores. Works the Middleboro Sec., Taunton Industrial Track, and Middleboro Yard throughout the evening, then waits until commuter rail shuts down for the night to go up the Old Colony. Returns to Framingham by morning. If they run out of crew hours they outlaw in Middleboro Yard instead of returning to Framingham, re-crew in the morning, and finish up the OC the next morning after rush hour.
Main business is shortline interchanges, as it exchanges cars with Mass Coastal @ Middleboro Yard and Fore River Transportation @ Braintree Yard. Overflow empties from Fore River will sometimes be stored on the Randolph Industrial Track, visible to passing commuter trains.
Active customers include:
- Linde (chemical co.), Attleboro near Attleboro Jct.
- 1 or 2 small customers on the Taunton Industrial Track (lots of unused sidings in that industrial park)
- some factory in Taunton @ Cotley Jct.
- Warren Trask (lumber???), Lakeville
- Middleboro Yard transloads
- Trojan Recycling, Brockton (adjacent Campello Station, debris cars usually parked in view of the platform)
- Champion City Recovery (recycling), Brockton, north of Montello Station (big customer...siding has mini-yard with 30-car storage capacity)
- several unused sidings, Bridgewater-Avon + unused Randolph Industrial Track (Burke Distribution stopped receiving 2 years ago in some sort of dispute)
A few of those unused sidings would be gimmes for a RR that cared about generating local biz, but CSX only cares about the interchanges here.
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Mass Coastal is the other player. They're a division of Cape Rail, who are in turn a holding of Iowa Pacific, Inc. Cape Rail does business in freight under the Mass Coastal reporting mark and business in passenger under the Cape Cod Central reporting mark...but are one and the same. MC has rights to the Cape Main south of Middleboro Jct., Falmouth Branch, Otis AFB spur, Hyannis Branch (main maintenance yard), Yarmouth spur, Fall River Line (in process of being reactivated by them from the port to RI state line), New Bedford Line, and Dean St. Industrial Track (a.k.a. isolated southernmost tip of Stoughton Line in Taunton). They have overhead rights (i.e. can move goods, but can't serve any customer sidings) on the Middleboro Secondary to Taunton to pass between their Taunton/South Coast and Cape lines.
Their main M'boro-Cape biz is the Cape trash train, transporting municipal garbage from on-Cape at Yarmouth Transfer Station to the large SEMASS energy plant in Rochester. That's how they keep garbage trucks from clogging up the bridges. Trash train runs 3 days a week.
Brand new customer, Cassova, started this summer shipping out construction debris from Falmouth Transfer Station on the Otis spur, necessitating a lot of the recent MassDOT funding for rehabbing the Falmouth Branch. Right now they're only taking 1-2 cars at a time couple times a week, but are supposed to be expanding operations. Otis is supposed to be imminently rehabbing its spur for military uses (likeliest: shipping in/out vehicles on flatbed for training exercises so they don't clog the bridges).
Customers (besides SEMASS):
- Ocean Spray, Middleboro (just out of sight to east from M'boro Station platform)
- 2 sidings, unknown status, Middleboro-Rochester
- ...bunch else in the Taunton/South Coast line cluster (out-of-scope for this discussion, but bullish freight growth here is why the state's dropping an impressive sum of coin right this instant and for the next 3 years on upgrades to the Framingham Sec. and Middleboro Sec.)
The Cape is not a real hotbed for on-line biz, but now that MassDOT owns the Otis spur and the base is warming up to both commercial tenants at the old transfer station and military rail use there's some potentially good upside there (and it pisses off the Falmouth Branch bike path nihilists who think they can tear out active rails!).
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Current CSX management is actively shopping low-margin lines across its network to dish off to other players. They already did sell off their Everett Terminal job to Pan Am earlier this month. B729 is the next-likeliest to go because the job is crew-intensive and hours-intensive for the shifts it works, they don't really care about any of the on-line biz, and the Mass Coastal and Fore River interchanges that they
do value can be reached through other means. Their bread-and-butter in New England is gigantic intermodal trains, and interchange loads...so it behooves them to pare down their locals to a barest minimum. This job is the last "guilt-free" one they can drop without risking a competitive intrusion.
Mass Coastal's trackage rights for the Cape (only the Cape, not Taunton/South Coast) are up next year for competitive bid, because that's the way MassDOT has managed those lines for decades. They'll either win the renewal, or one of the rival consortiums bidding will end up more or less subsuming the whole Cape Rail system in a buyout from Iowa Pacific. And so it'll probably be when the entire next term-of-contract is secured that CSX will try to cash out its rights on the OC, Middleboro Sec., and the industrial tracks. MC (or successor) interchange would probably get handled at Attleboro Jct. by the mid-afternoon NEC local, and Braintree pickups would get handled by a nocturnal shortie out of Readville (which would later tack on South Boston Marine Terminal when Massport builds out that spur off Track 61).
No real commuter rail impact if this happens, except for the positive of CSX deleting one of its NEC dailies. Mass Coastal can putter around on the OC midday off-peak without getting in the way, since the T doesn't really have much in the way of train meets on the off-peak. If they run into start of rush hour there's Track 3 (a.k.a. Brockton Running Track) adjacent to Brockton Station right at the midpoint between Braintree & Middleboro Yards where they can turn out and park a 1500 ft. train until peak is over.
