(The Rutland Herald posted the following article by Gordon Dritschilo on its website on May 4.)
RUTLAND, Vt. — Rail in Rutland has a rich history and, according to one Vermont Agency of Transportation official, a bright future.
Rutland chartered the first railroad in Vermont in the 1830s, but a decade would pass before the money was found to build it.
In December 1849, railroad workers moving west from Bellows Falls and east from Rutland met up in Mount Holly.
“We had north-south traffic, out east to the Bellows Falls connection with the rest of New England, and then two branches that went west,” James Davidson of the Rutland Historical Society said. “They were used for both passenger and freight. A little later it was either a freight train or a passenger train only.”
Davidson said the railroad was key to the growth of the marble industry in what is today West Rutland and Proctor.
“You’ve got these huge blocks of marble,” he said. “How are you going to move them? On a wagon, you have to use oxen and it’s very slow. Plop it on a railroad flatcar, you can take it anywhere. Marble became not a local industry, but nationwide. Otherwise marble would have been used locally, but how would you move it to Chicago for buildings?”
Davidson said Rutland was the railroad center of Vermont from the 1870s until World War I, handling roughly 100 freight cars a day.
“Rutland was an important center, a manufacturing center, and had heavy industry in the middle of downtown,” he said. “It was an industrial city and the industry was right here in the city, spitting distance from the railroads.”
Howe Scale had an on-site foundry, making scales large enough to weigh a lake steamer. Patch-Wagner made towers for cranes and a variety of machines to cut, polish and work with marble.
“There was also Lincoln Iron Works,” Davidson said. “Three places, each had a foundry and made sizeable pieces of equipment that were shipped out on the railroad.”
The passenger railroad went north from Rutland to Burlington, stopping in Center Rutland and Proctor along the way.
“If you lived in Rutland and worked in Proctor, you could take the train to work,” Davidson said. “If you needed to go to West Rutland to go to the quarries, you might take the Rutland and Washington line. People in West Rutland took the train into town to vote — it was all one town at the time.”
While freight and passenger rail built Rutland up as an industrial center, Davidson said the trolley system that ran through the county built the city up as a retail center.
“You could pick up the phone in Poultney, call the Rutland store, order a pair of boots and they’d be put on the next trolley,” he said. “A man would go to work on the trolley, take the trolley home for lunch, back to work again and then take it home at the end of the day.”
In 1913, the Rutland rail system carried 3 million passengers.
“That’s one year,” he said. “Even if you count men going home for lunch, 3 million is a mind-boggling number for a community this size.”
However, the rise of the car and the truck would soon bring the era of rail supremacy to an end.
“Trains have to follow set tracks,” Davidson said. “Trucks deliver right to your door.”
The decline of the railroad business was well under way by the time Robert Reardon started work in the payroll department of the Rutland Railroad in 1947. Reardon, 80, was with the company until it shut down 14 years later.
“The first thing that went was the passenger service (in 1953),” Reardon said. “There wasn’t too much complaining. The main thing the passenger service did was drain off any small profit the freight business did.”
Even though the railroad was struggling, Reardon said it was well run and offered good-paying jobs.
“Not that it was any of my money, but I put out some of the best paychecks in the state of Vermont,” he said.
Reardon said the railroad could have kept running if its final president, William Ginsburg, had wanted it to.
In his book, “The Rutland Road,” historian James Shaughnessy wrote that Ginsburg did not intend to liquidate the company when he took over in 1957. Reardon disagrees.
“We refer to the day he took over as Dec. 7,” he said. “He just figured he could make more money if it ceased to operate and he could sell it off, parcel by parcel. He didn’t want to actually make a profit.”
Reardon said nobody at the railroad really believed the end was near, even when Ginsburg finally shut the company down and disassembled it after a strike in 1961.
“We never were that pessimistic,” he said. “Everybody kept waiting for a belated settlement, believing it would start up again. That didn’t come true.”
Freight still passes through Rutland, and passenger rail eventually returned in the form of Amtrak’s Ethan Allen Express, which began coming to the city in 1996.
“Today on the Vermont Railroad, trains pull OMYA tank cars,” Davidson said. “The material OMYA is shipping goes all over the world.”
David Dill, director of operations for AOT, said he sees an important future for both passenger and freight rail in Vermont.
“With the new administration, we have promised and intend to thoroughly examine the transportation network with the idea of making it a seamless, integrated network to get people and goods where they need to go more effectively,” he said. “That includes rail, definitely.”
Dill said that much of the focus of development by the state is going to be on freight, but that he thinks passenger rail has great potential and evidence of that potential is in Rutland.
“You see the Ethan Allen coming in, filled with passengers, and buses lined up to take those passengers to ski areas,” he said. “That’s an example of the kind of seamless network we want.”
Dill said he would like to see passenger service on the western rail corridor running from Bennington to Burlington, so that one day someone from Rutland could catch the morning train to Burlington, go shopping, have dinner and catch the evening train home.
“The problem is we can’t do everything overnight,” he said. “We have to do things step by step as resources become available. We have to focus on a rail plan that prioritizes our efforts as we move down this path. I think we want to look at five, 10 or 20 years ahead, looking at a game plan to strengthen rail access around the state.”
Amtrak spokesman Daniel Stessel said he is confident of continued support for passenger rail in the Rutland area. He said the future of lines like the Ethan Allen is completely up to the state.
“The Vermont trains operate with state support,” he said. “Much is dependent on the continuation of that support. Vermont really has the say on how it evolves.”