Boston and Lowell Railroad

Boston and Lowell Railroad

Map of the Southern Division as it was in 1887, just before it was leased by the Boston and Maine Railroad, including the original Boston to Lowell mainline
Locale	Boston to Lowell, Massachusetts and beyond into New Hampshire and Vermont
Dates of operation	1835–
Track gauge	4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge

The Boston and Lowell Railroad is a historic railroad that operated in Massachusetts in the United States. It was one of the first railroads in North America and the first major one in the state. The line later operated as part of the Boston and Maine Railroad's Southern Division.

In the early 19th century, Francis Cabot Lowell and his friends and colleagues established in Waltham, Massachusetts, the Boston Manufacturing Company—the first integrated textile mill in the United States. After Lowell's death in 1817, his partners searched for a new location with greater waterpower to expand textile production and add calico printing to their capabilities. In 1821 they purchased property adjoining the Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River, an area also served by the Middlesex Canal. In 1823 the Merrimack Manufacturing Company began producing cotton cloth in the "Middlesex Village" hamlet in East Chelmsford. In 1826, the area was incorporated as the town of Lowell, Massachusetts, named in honor of Francis Cabot Lowell.

Before the railroad, there were several ways of moving goods between Lowell and the port of Boston warehouses. The Middlesex Canal, which opened in stages between 1804 and 1814 and linked Boston with Concord, New Hampshire, was usable eight months a year, being closed during the winter months. Boating services by a variety of independent operators (called "transients" by canal management) and the few big boating operators were regularly reaching towns of eastern Vermont and western New Hampshire, in the Green Mountains and White Mountains respectively, with small boats known to service towns 150 miles (240 km) from the mouth of the Merrimack. Despite the innate high bulk handling advantages of canal boats, stagecoaches and cartiers' heavy-haul wagons offered competitive freight hauling rates and often competed successfully with the Middlesex Canal and ran effectively when the weather was dry on the road between Boston and Lowell. Large horse-drawn wagons carried freight, but along with environmental risks and delays, there were additional significant charges for carriage within the city and for unloading by stevedores, so cartage was also not ideal to get finished cloth to the dock warehouses — therein the canal boats had the edge, for they delivered directly without extra charges. These sufficed for some time, but as Lowell grew and more industrialists built mills there, problems with both modes soon motivated them to learn more of the newfangled railways that had been in the European news increasingly since 1820.