Friday, April 16, 2021

A Few Twists and Turns

 

Seems like this twisted mess was typical of the week's finds.  Odds and ends were about in both the Concord River on Sunday morning and the Assabet River on Wednesday.  The stuff ran the gamut from a green dimpled Sprite bottle embossed with "Hawaii National Park" just upstream of Concord's Old North Bridge...

...to an empty Acetone container in the Assabet...


And post-paddle I almost stepped on this garter snake (first of the season for me)...

This doe seemed as perplexed by things as I was and approached...perhaps looking for an answer...


The week's trash...



Nonetheless it was good to see the Concord Minuteman standing ever at the ready...


...and the Concord River still heading off to the northward...


It's been 6 weeks now since the cessation of commuter train service on the Fitchburg Commuter Rail east of Littleton.  Railroad bridges over the  Assabet and Concord rivers in Concord are silent and won't see another scheduled train until May.  So it was only fitting that between my 2 paddles of the week I rode my bike along the Assabet River Rail Trail in South Acton where, thanks to the lack of vegetation, a stone structure I'd not noticed before caught my eye.  Entered the woods adjacent to the trail and soon found myself looking at the remains of an old railroad turntable's stone-laid foundation...

The turntable allowed steam locomotives to be turned before being placed in a 2-stall engine house just to the immediate south.  The floor of the engine house still reveals the pits below the tracks supporting the locomotives...

The rear wall of the engine house as seen from behind...

As I walked out of the woods that day I only suspected it was the foundation of a turntable.  Confirmation would be found later on-line including discussions as to whether or not the remains should be a feature of the rail trail.  The area is presently overgrown and ticks are plentiful (as I can personally attest).   My appetite for confirmation was finally satisfied after seeing this Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of the spot from 1918.  The map locates the turntable and engine house near the beginning of the Fitchburg RRs Marlborough Branch in South Acton.  While I knew there was a turntable at South Acton Junction. my thinking was its location would have been closer to the mainline rather than the branchline.  Thanks to the Boston and Maine Railroad Historical Society's on-line archives, additional information about the turntable was found including the following from a 1918 engineering report: Turntable installed 1892, was made of steel and 60 feet long, was of the "cone roll" center type, was rotated by hand, rated for 112 tons, and was turned 6 times per day.  Standing by the turntable's foundation one can imagine a couple of fellas putting their backs into turning a locomotive and tender.  Walking across the floor of the engine house one can imagine a pair of steam locomotives hissing and groaning with their fires banked until the next morning's commuter cycle. 

One last relic from those old time railroad days is this more than a century old "tell-tale" located where the Marlborough Branch once passed under a bridge before joining the mainline...


From its horizontal arm, shown above (seen behind the tree), extending out over the rails there were once about 20 vertical pieces of rope or thin rods.  It was those hanging strands which told the "tale" to any railroad brakeman riding atop a boxcar..."Duck"!


 

2 comments:

Trigirlpink said...

I’m so annoyed with the litter I’ve been seeing. 128 N and S is loaded on the sides of the road. Not sure why I’ve suddenly noticed this now. Also I photograph birds at Horn Pond and the dam in Watertown on the Charles. Way too much garbage floating around. Thanks for your help out there.

Al said...

Hello Trigirlpink, I agree about how visible the litter is now. A lot of it will disappear once the roadside plants leaf out... but it does show us just how many folks routinely toss trash out their car windows. Hope you get some good bird photos this Earth Week.