October 6, 2026: Trains!: New England Ports

[On October 7, 1826, America’s first commercial railroad, the Massachusetts Granite Railway, began operations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that line and other important moments in the history of American commercial rail and its contexts, leading up to a weekend post on pop culture representations!]

Takeaways from the commercial trains that serviced several key New England waterfronts.

1. Salem, MA: That piece from Salem State University librarian Susan Edwards nicely traces the 1830s origins and 19^th-century development of the city’s railroad lines, famous depot (designed by yesterday’s subject Gridley Bryant), and their contexts. I would highlight in particular this paragraph: “Salem became a distribution point for manufacturing. Materials made in local factories such as textiles from Lowell and Lawrence were received in Salem by water and then transported by Boston and Maine trains to their destinations. The freight depot on Mill Street encompassed approximately twenty-five acres and could see as many as three hundred freight cars daily. 250 men were employed in Salem’s repair shop on Bridge Street alone, which repaired 3,500 freight cars and 300 passenger cars annually.” We can’t remember the Industrial Revolution in Massachusetts and America without thinking about how these transportation innovations connected corporations and communities alike, and transformed the nation.  
2. Portsmouth, NH: That brief but informative New Hampshire Department of Transportation page highlights a number of telling details about the expansion of commercial railroad lines in the 1840s, but none is more striking than this one: “In 1840 only 3000 miles of track were laid in the U.S., but by 1850 it mushroomed to 9000 miles. Nearly 60 percent of the railroad lines were located in New England, which were used to bring goods from its booming manufacturing centers to markets.” My only quibble might be with the sequence suggested by that final clause—it seems to me that places like Portsmouth boomed after, and because of, the opening of railway lines like the Portsmouth and Kittery Eastern Railroad. (The site does suggest as much elsewhere, with the line, “The arrival of the Eastern Railroad fueled a population and building boom in Portsmouth in the 1840s and 1850s.”) As I discussed in my August series on Laurel, Mississippi, where commercial trains go, blossoming towns follow.
3. New London, CT: That page (part of the broader Genesee & Wyoming Railroad site) details a series of interconnected commercial rail lines that originate in the significant port of New London and stretch across much of New England. It’s current (at least as of June 2024), and that’s why I wanted to include it in this post—as much as American railroad history rightly centers on the 19^th century, it of course continued throughout the 20^th and has endured (if in shifting and often threatened forms) into the 21^st. The same, of course, could be said of American ports and the commerce they feature, Baltimore’s examples of which was a central subject of the second season of The Wire. But as much as these commercial and transportation histories might seem like just that, relics of a distant past, they remain very much present, and indeed essential to our economy and nation in 2026.

Next train! tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rail histories or contexts you’d share?