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Dang.
(I can't pretend this doesn't hurt.)
I like to think of myself as the number one fan of the Central Mass Railroad. I've hiked the whole thing from Clematis Brook to Northampton. I've been working on a hikers' guide and history of it for a long long time. (Feel free to e-mail me and pester me about when the heck is it going to be published.) When I first hiked the section in Weston and Wayland, there were two nifty replacement depots still standing. (Not the originals- but very cool.) These were both small "shelter" type depots which were constructed to replace the original ornate ones which had presumably burned down shortly after the turn of the century. Click here for an image of Cherry Brook in 1928. You can clearly see this is the same depot. (Very cool to compare this with my photos.) Click here to see a picture of the original Tower Hill Depot in 1929. This is not the same one as in my pic. I captured an image of the replacement depot, at the end of it's days. (I was standing on the roadbed, to the left of the vantage in this picture.)
I recently looked for the one at Tower Hill in Wayland and could not find it. I thought it may have been destroyed. But I have just learned from my pal Gary of Railroad Depots in Massachusetts fame that they are both now gone. :-(
He writes,
"Steve: Just heard from a fellow named PeteWhittenberger who tells me that the Cherry brook station was vandalized by fire several years ago and then demolished by NSTAR crews clearing brush along the power lines in 1998. I'm posting it as "Gone" with your old photo of it and a b&w shot. I guess that solves that. Also, he tells me that Tower Hill was torched by vandals in the 80's (he thinks) and is now gone. It's already posted as "Gone" but I'd like to get a photo up for it. Here's what you had written to me a while back:
These are pics of the old Tower Hill Depot and the "new" Cherry Brook. There is a wonderful photo of the new Cherry Brook in it's heyday from the 1920's. A lady with a 1920s outfit is standing next to the shelter type depot with period signs on it. ("Buy Coca-Cola", etc.) Last time I was there, the Cherry Brook stop was there, albeit burnt out and ruined. The Tower Hill one was there, but when I went back recently I could not see it from the road. But it may be hidden behind a bush.
Guess it isn't hidden after all. gary" ----------
----- So I'm making this page. Click on a thumbnail for the full-size
image. I took these back in the Summer of 1987. (I was actually hiking
with a pal the day these were taken. We were hiking from Clematis Brook
in Waltham all the way to to Rutland. Really. Took us 2 days but we did
it.)
The Cherry Brook one was so cool. What I liked best was that
I had actually vistited it again later at night a couple of times and get
this- there actually used to be a streetlight still working every
night that lit the way down to the depot- even though passenger trains
had stopped coming there in 1971. Maybe THAT'S still there. Dang.
-Steve Fisk 5/25/02
Click here
to go to my "Mystery Depots of Massachusetts and New Hampshire" index page.
This is a strange schedule featuring stops at the two depots in question. Strange because service was cut back to to Hudson in 1958 and then back to South Sudbury in 1965. Yet this schedule shows Marlboro as the terminus. I have to wonder if at some point in the early 1960s passenger trains went down the Marlboro Branch. Odd.