The Westboro Rail Yard was once a wonder, but in recent decades it was a testament to inertia — “deserted and decrepit,” in the words of a Valley News story in 1987.
A haunting wind blew through the large brick roundhouse, and wooden shacks were “rotting ruins.” Beer cans and soggy mattresses cluttered the old bunkhouse, which was open to the elements.
I remember it. On some weekend mornings in the 1980s, I used to stroll through the rail yard — industrial decay is both stirring and sad and makes you think of days when mighty work was underway.
The late Scott E. Hastings Jr., whose Goodbye Highland Yankee chronicled a boyhood in West Lebanon in the 1920s and 1930s, wrote that coal-burning locomotives dominated life then.
It wasn’t pristine, but the age of rail was noisy and productive: “In West Lebanon, the tracks, roundhouse and machine shops where the trains were repaired, sanded, coaled, and watered were spread out down along the river. The place was marked by a great smoking chimney and the gaunt skeleton of a black crane used to load coal and move ashes.
“For twenty-four hours every day, the town vibrated to the chuffing of the giant engines proceeding ponderously about their businesses. The plumes of black smoke rising from their smokestacks caused womenfolk to hang out washing only when the wind blew right, lest the clean clothes become speckled with soot. As children, lying in our beds in the small hours, we heard the long-drawn, mournful hooting of these leviathans as they hauled their rattling strings of freight northward up the valley.”
Once, historical accounts say, as many as 50 freight and passenger trains passed through daily.
But cars and trucks disrupted the rail business. By 1965, according to Roger Carroll’s history of Lebanon, only two freight trains a day used the old Northern Line to Concord and beyond. At some point in the 1970s, there were none.
Newspapers clips from the 1980s and later contain quotes from local officials and residents who promoted repurposing the old rail yard, but they received little response from the struggling owners, Boston & Maine, then Guilford, and later the State of New Hampshire, which eventually took title. As inertia ruled, the buildings deteriorated. Young people snuck in for paintball battles. Teens accidentally set fire to the old bunkhouse. Barbecue grills and rusted cans were evidence that the bunkhouse wasn’t entirely unused.
In 1987, a Valley News story asked local people for ideas of what could happen there. A commercial real estate agent, Bruce Waters, called it “an exciting piece of real estate.” He tended to be a professional optimist, a business booster. But Edgar Mead, a retired economist who had written eight books on railroad history, said “There isn’t much worth saving. It’s 80 years out of date. It might make a nice park.”
Around that time a group of Dartmouth engineering students let their imaginations run wild. They dreamed up ideas like a shopping mall, senior housing, and a recreation center with an atrium, rooftop pool, skating rink, playing fields and concessions run out of old railroad cars.
In the 1990s, a city master plan draft contained ideas like shops, a farmers market, and a restaurant in the old bunkhouse.
But none of that happened. Again and again, city officials, business people and railroad buffs reached out, but the railroad companies and the state didn’t answer. The state eventually put up a fence around the roundhouse, and a sign that warned of asbestos. At one time, oil was leaking into the river.
I stopped visiting, and crossing the old railroad bridge into White River Junction. As you grow older, you feel less free to wander on land where you might be unwelcome, or trespassing, for that matter.
It seemed ironic that when Gov. Chris Sununu came to Lebanon last year to “celebrate” demolition of the old sandhouse — the bunkhouse and roundhouse were also flattened — he was taken aback by the condition of the wooden structure. “Why hasn’t somebody taken this down?” he was quoted as saying. “This is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy.”
Soon after, Robert Welsch, former chairman of the city Heritage Commission, wrote a letter to the Valley News Forum blaming “Sununu and his ilk” for letting the rail yard die a slow death from neglect. Preservationists had been trying for at least two decades to get something done to save the sandhouse — the last of its kind in New England — and were all but ignored.
Finally, the city is getting something out of the old rail site. It will lease land for recreation with a beautiful view of a river that is being rediscovered.
That strikes me as a worthy use, but not as exciting as the arrival of the railroad to Lebanon in 1847. It was life-changing. Roger Carroll’s history points out that a trip to Boston that took six days by stage thereafter took just a day.
It was such an occasion that city fathers (and mothers, uncredited) brought in Daniel Webster, the famed statesman, orator, lawyer and Dartmouth grad, to give a grand speech.
He saw the railroads as part of a triumphant march. “Truly this is almost a miraculous era,” he said. “What is before us no one can say, what is upon us no one can hardly realize. The progress of this age has almost outstripped human belief.”
But after the railroads came cars and trucks and planes. Now comes the Internet, which seeks to make time and distance irrelevant. Human belief continues to be challenged by the pace of it all.
As for me, I will be happy to walk on new city parkland, to think about things large and small in my own humble way — and take in the views. It’s been a long time between visits.
Dan Mackie lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com