Bedford Depot

About this property

Bedford Depot is a historic railroad depot in Bedford, Massachusetts, United States. Bedford was the junction of the Reformatory Branch and the Lexington Branch of the Boston and Maine Railroad; it saw passenger service until 1977 as the stub of the Lexington Branch. The original 1874 depot and 1877 freight house are listed on the National Register of Historic Places; along with a restored Budd Rail Diesel Car, they form the centerpieces of the Bedford Depot Park. The Lexington and West Cambridge Railroad was built to what is now Lexington Center in 1845–46, and bought by the Boston and Lowell Railroad in 1870 in order to prevent the line from building an alternate route to Lowell via Bedford. In August 1873, the subsidiary Middlesex Central Railroad opened an extension to Concord Center via Bedford. A Victorian-style passenger station was built in 1874. In 1877, the Billerica and Bedford Railroad, a 2 ft (610 mm) narrow-gauge line, opened from Bedford Depot to North Billerica. The line built a two-stall engine house and a turntable at the Bedford terminus. The Billerica and Bedford was markedly unsuccessful, and closed down in 1878. In 1879, the Middlesex Central was extended to Reformatory station in Concord; this permitted short-lived through service to Nashua via a connection to the Nashua, Acton, and Boston Railroad. In 1885, the Boston & Lowell rebuilt the route to Billerica as part of their standard gauge network. The depot, originally west of South Road, was moved to its present location at the junction. The narrow gauge engine house was also moved and turned into a freight depot. Two years later, the Boston and Maine Railroad absorbed the Boston & Lowell, including the two routes through Bedford. After the Cambridge subway opened in 1912, streetcar lines connecting at Harvard Square began to siphon off passenger traffic from the northwestern suburban lines. Within six years, about half of Lexington Branch trains (through trains from Reformatory and Lowell, plus short turns from Bedford, Lexington, and Arlington) had been cut from schedules. Passenger service ended on the Reformatory Branch in 1926, and on the Lexington Branch beyond Bedford in 1933, though freight service continued for several more decades. A wye with an engine house in the center was built just west of the station around this time to turn trains. By 1950 service was down to three daily round trips from Bedford; this decreased to two several years later and one on May 18, 1958. When the newly formed MBTA began subsidizing B&M commuter service in 1965, the MBTA intended to drop the single Lexington Branch and Central Mass Branch round trips, but they were instead kept.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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