The Fairhaven Branch Railroad was a short-line railroad in Massachusetts. It ran from West Wareham on the Cape Cod main line of the Old Colony Railroad, southwest to Fairhaven, a town across the Acushnet River from New Bedford.
History
The Fairhaven Branch Railroad (FBRR) was incorporated in 1849, chartered in 1851, and built from 1852 to 1854. The New Bedford and Taunton Railroad bought the line in 1861, including its ferry terminals at New Bedford and Fairhaven, which afforded connections to Woods Hole and Martha's Vineyard via steamship. The railroad was merged into the Old Colony Railroad in 1883, four years after the Old Colony leased the Boston, Clinton, Fitchburg and New Bedford Railroad, the successor to the New Bedford and Taunton.
Notable among the early employees of the FBRR was Henry Huttleston Rogers. Born in 1840, he was the son of a former ship's captain and grocer in Fairhaven. After graduating from high school in 1857, "Hen" Rogers hired on with the Fairhaven Branch Railroad as an expressman and brakeman. He worked for three or four years, carefully saving what he could from his meager earnings. Eventually, Henry Rogers rose within the growing petroleum industry to become one of the three key men in John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust.
On March 1, 1893 the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad (better known as the "New Haven") leased the massive Old Colony system, which by then included the Boston and Providence Railroad and everything substantially east of it, as well as long branches northwest to Fitchburg and Lowell. Along with the lease of the New England Railroad in 1898, this gave the New Haven a virtual monopoly on rail transport in New England south of the Boston and Albany Railroad.
Abandonment
Beginning in the 1920s, automobiles and improved highways began to provide major competition to the New Haven. The company began cutback on operations of many branch lines. The New Haven's freight operations declined on the Fairhaven Branch. The railroad tried a couple of times in the 1940s to end service and abandon the Fairhaven Branch, but vocal shippers protested. Finally, in 1953, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) formally granted the abandonment.
The Fairhaven Branch was formally abandoned between Fairhaven and Marion on April 2, 1953. Between 1953 and 1968, the New Haven moved boxcars and covered hoppers of sand from the WHIBCO sand pit in Marion. In 1969, the Penn Central Railroad, created out of a merger between the New Haven, New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads, took over operations of the New Haven and hauled the loads of sand the 2.5 miles between the sand pit and Tremont Junction, where they would be picked up by the Cape Cod local freight. This continued until 1973, when the Penn Central abandoned the rest of the line to Tremont.
On March 7, 1992, a passenger excursion run by the Cape Cod Railroad ran down a short portion of the overgrown and dilapidated Fairhaven Branch. The train was only able to go so far because of dense overgrowth and poor track conditions. This would be the last passenger train on the Fairhaven Branch, and the last train the branch would ever see.
Trail conversion
Proposals to convert the line to a rail trail began in the 1970s. In 1996, a local resident built a narrow wooden bridge across the outlet channel of Eel Pond in Mattapoisett, enabling use of a section of the former right-of-way for recreation. He and others built a series of replacement bridges across the widening channel, with the last completed in 2010. In 1999, of the former line from the Fairhaven terminus to the Mattapoisett town line was converted to the Phoenix Rail Trail (named after nearby Fort Phoenix). The first of the Mattapoisett Rail Trail was completed in 2010, extending the trail to Mattapoisett Neck Road. That year, Old Colony Regional Vocational Technical High School students rebuilt the bridge over the Mattapoisett River, allowing use of a further of unpaved right-of-way.
In January 2019, the state received a $9 million federal CMAQ grant to fund construction of the next in Mattapoisett from Mattapoisett Neck Road to Depot Street. In February 2019, MassDOT awarded a $7 million contract for the construction, with notice to proceed given in late March. The cost of the section, which was significantly higher than most rail trail construction, was due to the environmental difficulty of constructing a trail through sensitive wetlands. It opened in April 2023 after a delay due to repairs to a boardwalk section.