Once you start digging around you never know where things may turn up, or who may turn them up for you. One of the great mysteries of New England railroad history is the proposed Southern New England Railroad – better known to many New England school kids as the “Titanic Railroad” (more on that later). This line that was the brainchild of the President of the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada, Charles Melville Hays. I’ve known about the railroad for years having first seen evidence of it on elementary school trips since some of bridge abutments and other infrastructure built for the line in the teens and twenties is still clearly visible. The proposed route between Palmer, Massachusetts (and a connection with the New London Northern to Canada) and Providence, Rhode Island, and a connection with a warm water port – truly a necessity in the days before the St. Lawrence Seaway opened, meandered it’s way between the two end points. A straight line would have taken the route directly through the northwest corner of Connecticut. So why didn’t it go that way? although this last proposed major railroad construction project in New England was hardly a transcontinental route, the answer to that question ties into our reading for this week.
The reason this railroad went the long way around was the stranglehold held on the Connecticut legislature and the transportation network in New England held by J. P. Morgan, Charles Mellen and company with the New Haven railroad. Some believe the Southern New England was never intended to be built – it was nothing more than a scheme cooked up by Hays to extort money from the New Haven - and the good residents of Boston and Providence who finally saw a chance to return competition to the picture and break the New Haven's monopoly.
We’ll never know his true intentions as Hays, who regularly went to England to raise money from those poor gullible English investors for his various railroad schemes. He had some luck generating investments but much worse look making his travel arrangements as he made the poor choice to make his last return trip to the U. S. aboard the RMS Titanic (hence the “Titanic Railroad” nickname).
Although the legend of the story has the Southern New England dream dying with Hays, in actuality construction started on the railroad in 1914 – more than two years after his death – and was not formally ended until 1931.
The railroad never was a railroad – there was never an foot of track laid, although millions of dollars in stocks and bonds were bought and sold. The roadbed was graded, and today some of it serves as highways, other stretches as hike-bike trails. The bridge abutments are still there as well, some of the bridges on the line would have been spectacular since the route required lots of cuts, fills, and spans to maintain a relatively level grade.
Knowing of my interest in the Southern New England a good friend of mine called me last week to let me know he had obtained one or two known complete maps of the proposed route. Considering what I learned about maps last year, I was thrilled when he offered to send me digital pictures of the maps. I’ve included a couple of them here – they’re pretty neat and show that all a true robber baron needed was a map, and a good story, to raise capital for a route that would never generate a cent in revenue.
