Westbrook, ME

For those who aren't trainheads...There are two industrial branches that spur west from the CSX / Downeaster Mainline (Red)

BLUE- The Former Maine Central Mountain Division (Now the Mountain Branch) Originally built as the Portland & Ogdensburg Railroad and mostly abandoned in the mid 80s when Guilford took over. It's now OOS west of Forest Street except for the Conway Scenic Railroad which operates the line through the famous "Crawfords Notch"

ORANGE: The former Boston & Maine Worster & Nashua Division (Which later became the Sanford & Eastern) which branches off of the mainline at Morrills corner. The line originally extended west through Westbrook and then headed southwest through Gorham, Sanford and into New Hampshire. The line was truncated when the Turnpike was built and this section of the line was orphaned as an industrial branch. The line west of Westbrook was abandoned in the early 1960s

Each of these branches currently have just one active customer sustaining them.

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Side note: anyone thinking "Hey, if the Mountain Branch is mostly OOS, it would make a great commuter rail line!", there are about 500 dreamers ahead of you. MaineDOT actually worked on improving the line past the mill a decade or so ago (it's cut off there and the track removed for a short distance, but the full ROW is intact), but I believe they threw up their hands when a truck hit the just-restored Mallison Falls Bridge near the prison. Plus, the project they were hoping to lure (a wood pellet plant) went nowhere.
 
markhb said:
Side note: anyone thinking "Hey, if the Mountain Branch is mostly OOS, it would make a great commuter rail line!", there are about 500 dreamers ahead of you. MaineDOT actually worked on improving the line past the mill a decade or so ago (it's cut off there and the track removed for a short distance, but the full ROW is intact), but I believe they threw up their hands when a truck hit the just-restored Mallison Falls Bridge near the prison. Plus, the project they were hoping to lure (a wood pellet plant) went nowhere.
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The work that was done on the line west of the mill (About 5 miles starting from Pierce Street) was intended to benefit a proposed wood pellet plant that was going to be built way out in Baldwin. The plant was going to use the Mountain Branch to send carloads to Portland for export to Europe (European countries import a lot of American wood pellets for energy production. It's a large and growing market)

But, of course, that plan fell through and to date that rebuilt portion of the line hasn't had a single revenue car roll over it.
 
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In 2019 the Amtrak Downeaster and Rock Row commissioned a study of a commuter rail service on the Mountain Division between downtown Westbrook and Portland:
https://www.nnepra.com/wp-content/u...to-Portland-Conceptual-Rail-Transit-Study.pdf

The current track is limited to 10 miles per hour; this report estimated that fixing the tracks to 60 mph standards and building new platforms to support passenger service would cost over $70 million, plus another $24-$36 million for new vehicles, plus $7 to $13 million every year in operating costs, which would only have trains running every 30-60 minutes. To put those numbers in context, the operating budget for the entire METRO bus system is $14.5 million a year.

A rule of thumb is that a neighborhood needs at least 3,000 people per square mile to support bus transit, and at least 15,000 people (ideally more) per sq. mi. to support light rail. The neighborhoods around the edges of downtown Westbrook currently have pretty low densities that barely meet thresholds for bus service, maxing out at 7K people per square mile in the Frenchtown neighborhood across the river:
https://censusreporter.org/profiles/15000US230050027001-bg-1-tract-27-cumberland-me/
 
On the other hand, if Westbrook could build 12,000 new apartments in the square mile outlined in white here, then you could probably justify the costs of a new light rail line on the Mountain Division.

Last I heard, Rock Row is planning 800 apartments on their site, so we'd just need 14 more of those :p

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cneal said:
On the other hand, if Westbrook could build 12,000 new apartments in the square mile outlined in white here, then you could probably justify the costs of a new light rail line on the Mountain Division.

Last I heard, Rock Row is planning 800 apartments on their site, so we'd just need 14 more of those :p
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With ~200 affordable units off Seavy Street....and then ~500 units on the southern side of Westbrook Arterial ....You'd only need -13- more Rock Rows ;)
 
Given both the continued freight traffic on the Mountain Branch and the presumption that any rail service would connect to the Amtrak station, light rail wouldn't even cut it; it would have to be heavy rail (presumably DMU's) for safety reasons. I can only imagine the density required to support that.
 
Sure, but it's the right kind of strategic thinking, which sets a bar to work toward with an established benefit. And if the City of Westbrook would up-zone the allowable density for the lots facing routes 25 and 25A – making it cost prohibitive to *not* re-develop to higher densities – then it could be realized in the nearer future.
 
GIL said:
Sure, but it's the right kind of strategic thinking, which sets a bar to work toward with an established benefit. And if the City of Westbrook would up-zone the allowable density for the lots facing routes 25 and 25A – making it cost prohibitive to *not* re-develop to higher densities – then it could be realized in the nearer future.
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As much as I agree with this, Westbrook residents are already starting to push back HARD against development. Several Planning Board meetings in recent months have gone 4+ hours with people losing their minds over simple in-fill developments that build to the allowable density of the lot, and for 20+ years these meetings have been barely attended. As I noted on the prior page, people are legitimately going apeshit over the RFQ to develop those downtown parking lots. The overwhelming majority of this push-back is coming from the older generations and stodgier "I like it the way it is" folks that lack any sort of vision or ability to see the forest through the trees. I've heard "too much too fast" more than I care to hear it in the past few weeks.

I don't think the outrage is justifiable, but it's real.
 
I mean,
markhb said:
Given both the continued freight traffic on the Mountain Branch and the presumption that any rail service would connect to the Amtrak station, light rail wouldn't even cut it; it would have to be heavy rail (presumably DMU's) for safety reasons. I can only imagine the density required to support that.
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I brought this up more to illustrate how pie-in-the-sky this proposal is, but if it *were* ever to come to pass, it'll be cheaper and more effective to simply buy out the single remaining industrial customer and relocate them to a new spot on the CSX mainline (and free up that lot for transit-oriented development) than to design an inefficient diesel-powered heavy-rail project around them.
 
Worth bearing in mind that the branch between Westbrook and Portland is owned by CSX, not by the state and unlike the previous Maine railroad regime, CSX knows how to run a railroad as a business. It seems like the presence of a Class 1 railroad is enticing smaller shippers back to rail service that had been chased away by Guilford / PanAm's horrible local switching services and waybilling.

Just over the past week overgrowth has been cleared and a small amount of ballasting has been done on an industrial siding leading to a manufacturing / warehousing space in the Pine Tree Industrial park (Just off of Rand Rd). Local freight isn't going anywhere on the branch anytime soon.
 
If this particular line is going to be continued to be used for freight, those industrial and warehousing land uses are incompatible with an expensive new rail transit service.

If this line is going to be used for transit service, then almost all of those industrial parcels will need to be redeveloped at much higher density to support the service, and the residents of new mixed-use neighborhoods prefer living next to a quiet electrified light rail line to living next to a loud, polluting diesel line.

CSX has been a willing seller of little-used branch lines like this one in other states, so if the cities wanted to go that route, it's a possibility. But it would definitely require a lot of upzoning, clever public finance, and ambition.
 
I think at the end of the day, the earlier proposals (which in many cases weren't for high-frequency transit, but DMU commuter rail service running potentially as far out as Steep Falls) are dead, and the shuttle to Rock Row that was being floated by the developers as an amenity is also dead.
 
From the other day. I really hope a developer comes in some day to replace those one-story structures on Main Street. They are by far some of the ugliest buildings in the city's downtown core.

There was a developer at one point several years ago that was proposing to tear down CVS and Family Dollar and replace them with a hotel, but that never went anywhere.

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cneal said:
Family Dollar has already been redeveloped as a hotel... for rats

www.pressherald.com

Rat-infested store in Westbrook posed numerous hazards

A city inspection last month found live rats, decaying rats, rat feces and urine and property damage from the rodents.
www.pressherald.com www.pressherald.com
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Locals, especially those that fall for and love the scam that is dollar stores, are all blaming the construction for the rats. And I'm over here like "Have you been in the store? The rats were there long before construction began."
 
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