The entire railroad--mainline + branch--ceased operations in 1940 when it went bankrupt. That line always remained an independent shortline and never ended up getting swallowed up by Boston & Maine like the rest of the northside. That's why it fell all at once. BERy bought the mainline through Revere in 1941 in the bankruptcy liquidation, intending to start immediate construction of a Mattapan-style high speed trolley interurban from Maverick trolley portal to Revere Beach on the ROW as means of consolidating some of the slower streetcar routes paralleling the corridor. It was NOT envisioned as a heavy rail extension at first. Winthrop Branch was left out of that transit plan because, unlike the mainline, the RR route served less density than the more convenient pre-existing streetcars to Winthrop. Town ended up with control of the ROW in the bankruptcy liquidation.
WWII then hit, and the interurban plan was postponed for wartime materials and labor savings. Winthrop Branch was immediately torn up in '41--same year of the public purchase--for its wartime scrap value: rail, ties, station buildings, everything. So within 18 months of the last passenger train the only thing left of the branch was a short length of street-running rail downtown that wasn't worth the cost of removal. Rapid transit construction belatedly began on the mainline in 1948 for Phase I from Maverick to Orient Heights...now with the MTA in charge, mode switched from trolley to heavy rail, and intended final terminus for Phase II now being Lynn instead of Revere Beach.
Most of the Winthrop Branch ROW was repurposed for extending the street grid. Morton St., Argyle St., Veterans Rd., Hagman Rd., and Walden St. trace out the north, east, and west sides of the loop. Morton aligns perfectly with the old bridge abutments from Orient Heights, and Veterans + Walden were new thoroughfares meant to replace narrower neighborhood streets. You can tell they're newer because of their width, extreme closeness to adjacent Shirley St., Beach Rd., and Read St. while the rest of the residential grid is more widely-spaced, and names like "Veterans" which are clearly postwar origin. The SE causeway over Crystal Cove is preserved in the two telltale sandbars a few feet out in the water (the center section long ago washed away). And then Hagman Rd. and the parking lot alley behind the downtown restaurants traces the link between that shoreline jog and the part Walden St. was built over.
You can walk about 90% of the ROW by going along these streets:
- Start at the old bridge abutments staring out across the water at the Orient Heights Blue Line yard.
- Walk the length of Morton.
- Cut through the parking lots behind Banks Elementary School, cross Ft. Banks Playground, and walk the full length of Argyle to Revere St.
- Next segment slices diagonally through a bunch of backyards and ends up next block near the Hutchinson/Crest intersection, then diagonally through another block until meeting the Sagamore/Crest intersection.
- Walk down Winthrop Shore Dr.--conspicuously wide where the ROW used to curve--to pick up the also conspicuously over-wide first block of Beach Rd.
- Split off Beach onto Veterans Rd. and walk the entire length of Veterans.
- Walk through the parking lot at the end of Veterans until you're looking out onto the curved causeway remnant.
- Walk along Washington St. to get a view out in the water of what's left of the second surviving causeway remnant.
- Cut from Washington down Winthrop St, where the west end of the causeway is open to the public as a marsh path.
- Pick up Sunnyside Ave. on the other side of the path and go to the intersection with Pleasant St. The ROW cuts diagonally through that intersection through the row of trees behind the brick apartment blocks.
- Walk up to French Square, then go into the alley/parking lot behind the restaurants. This is the other end of that backyard-splitting row of trees that started at the Pleasant/Sunnyside intersection.
- Go to the other side of the Square, where you'll see the preserved length of street-running track at the start of Hagman.
- Go all the way up Hagman and Walden.
- At the Walden/Main intersection ROW is obliterated for 2 blocks by buildings...the only place where actual structures, not backyards, block it. Will have to shift over to Read St.
- Back at Morton. You've now traced the complete Winthrop Branch everywhere except for that handful of backyard blocks and the missing chunks of causeway that washed away decades ago.
