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United States: Massachusetts / Cape Cod and the Islands Mid‑importance

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Merger proposal

It doesn't make sense to duplicate information on two different pages with slightly different names. Besides creating some confusion. Solar Apex (talk) 18:28, 29 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Disagree On the one hand, I agree that the pages are quite confusing in their current state as Stub or Start Class articles. I've been doing a bit of research in this area over the last several days, and it has taken a while for me to understand the gyrations of ownership which the early railroads underwent. On Cape Cod alone, the list of companies involved in railroads goes a little like this:

Cape Cod Branch Railroad - established in 1846.
Cape Cod Branch Railroad is renamed as the Cape Cod Railroad in February 1854.
Cape Cod Railroad acquired the Cape Cod Central Railroad (1861–1868) in 1868, extending its reach into central Cape Cod: Yarmouth to Dennis, Harwich, Brewster and Orleans.
In 1871, the Cape Cod Railroad bought the Plymouth and Vineyard Sound Railroad, which had been incorporated in 1861 as the Vineyard Sound Railroad Company to build a line from Buzzards Bay to Woods Hole. However, the line to Woods Hole was not completed until after the next merger...
In July 1872, the Cape Cod Railroad was merged with Old Colony and Newport Railway to form the Old Colony Railroad. The Cape Cod routes became known as the "Cape Cod Division" of the Old Colony Railroad.
In 1887, the Chatham Railroad Company completed its line, connecting Chatham to the Old Colony line at Harwich.
Old Colony's massive system was essentially acquired (by 99-year lease) by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad (NYNH&H) in 1893. Chatham Railroad remained independent until it too was leased to NYNH&H in 1905.
NYNH&H's financial troubles caused them to bankrupt in 1935, to terminate passenger service to Provincetown in 1938, and to terminate all passenger service to Cape Cod by 1959. The lines thus became freight-only.
NYNH&H was absorbed by Penn Central in 1969 (871 days later, Penn Central themselves went bankrupt.)
Penn Central was merged into Conrail in 1976, who then sold the Cape lines to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Massachusetts leased some of the lines to Bay Colony Railroad starting in 1982.
Since 2008, the Massachusetts Coastal Railroad has taken over operation of the state-owned freight lines on Cape Cod from the Bay Colony Railroad. Mass Coastal is the sister organization to the Cape Cod Central Railroad, as both are wholly-owned subsidiaries of Cape Rail Inc..
In 2012, Cape Rail Inc. was purchased by Iowa Pacific Holdings, although it continues to operate as a separate company.
The MBTA is planning to resume weekend service, called CapeFLYER, from Boston to Buzzards Bay and Hyannis, beginning on Memorial Day, 2013 and continuing through Labor Day.

Note, however, that the present-day Cape Cod Central Railroad, the subject of this merger proposal, is merely the namesake of the Cape Cod Central Railroad (1861–1868). Aside from the name, they share nothing in common – they are different companies from different eras, and they don't even share a single bit of track in common! The two pages that are the subject of this merge proposal would be the last two that I would choose to merge if I were forced to pick two out of the entire list above.

And before anyone instead suggests merging Cape Cod Railroad with Cape Cod Central Railroad (1861–1868), I would have to ask why we wouldn't just merge the pages of all of the dozen or so aforementioned companies together? Simply put, Because they are (or were) different companies, each with their own histories; we need not merge their articles any more than we would do away with the pages for Standard Oil and Humble Oil (who combined to form Exxon), or Exxon itself, who together with Mobil became ExxonMobil.

I would agree that many of the RR pages need to be tightened up, in that they all seem to "leak" their individual histories into each other's pages, making it difficult to connect all of the dots into the list I created above. Groll†ech (talk) 02:18, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Here's another suggestion that I think has some merit. The name of the article should be changed to "Cape Cod Railroads" (plural) and this article would become THE article for all things related to railroads on Cape Cod. Also, a new article would then be created for the former "Cape Cod Railroad" that would only cover this one topic. FFM784 (talk) 20:48, 22 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Acquisitions and trackage

It's a bit unclear which pieces of track were constructed by which company, when. A chart or map would be helpful. -- Beland (talk) 00:58, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Map incomplete

According to [1] there are active tracks going from North Falmouth to Otis AFB/Joint Base Cape Cod for a municipal solid waste/construction and demolition waste transfer station. These are not shown on the map. -- Beland (talk) 18:02, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Camp Edwards is part of JBCC and is indicated on the map. That's where the transfer station is located along with a spur line to the base itself (currently out of service). Please look at the map again. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 20:48, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I see it is on the route map in the infobox but not on the OSM relation, which I didn't look at at first. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 20:51, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]