Eastern Division
The Eastern Division main line of the Boston & Maine Railroad passed through several towns and cities in Massachusetts, and of those I am currently going to cover Newburyport and Salisbury as the line has been abandoned in this area. The line also passed through seven towns and cities in New Hampshire while running parallel to the coastline. They were Seabrook, Hampton Falls, Hampton, North Hampton, Greenland, Rye, and Portsmouth. Back in 1908 there were nine train stops located along this line within the stretch I am covering, as can be seen on this section of timetable.
This division started out as two separate railroads. The first of those was the Eastern Railroad, which ran from East Boston, MA to Portsmouth, NH. Construction of the line was completed in 1840 when two crews working towards each other met just south of the Massachusetts border. The second part of this division was the Portland, Saco, & Portsmouth Railroad, which connected to the Eastern Railroad at Portsmouth, NH and ran to Portland, ME. By 1842, construction of the line was finished and the Eastern Railroad signed a five year lease to gain control of the route. After the five year lease was up, a joint lease of the PS&P was formed between the Boston & Maine Railroad and the Eastern Railroad. This quickly revealed a major handicap of the Eastern Railroad though, which was that in order to reach downtown Boston, passengers had to be ferried across Boston Harbor from where the line terminated in East Boston. The solution that the Eastern Railroad came up with was the Boston Extension. It allowed trains to run straight into the downtown area and was opened in April of 1854. The joint lease of the PS&P lasted until 1870, at which point the Eastern Railroad won sole control of the line. Competition from the B&M and their newly built line to Portland was too much for the Eastern Railroad to handle though, leading to financial troubles. As a result, in 1884 the B&M was able to lease the Eastern Railroad including the PS&P.
About one-half of the Eastern Division segment that I am covering has been abandoned. The first length of track to go was from Newburyport, MA to Seabrook, NH, and that was in 1982. The stretch from Seabrook to Hampton was abandoned fifteen years later in 1997. Today, the section of this line that runs from Hampton, through Portsmouth, and into Kittery, ME is still used by Pan Am Railways.