Passenger rail service could be returning to the small Hampden County town of Palmer in the not-so-distant future – but where a future station might go is still being hashed out. Advocates for putting it downtown, at the historic Union Station site, have been making their case, even as officials consider other options.
Palmer – the “Town of Seven Railroads” – features one of the busiest rail hubs in the region, albeit, one without a passenger train stop.
It hasn’t hosted a functioning station since at least 1971, but that’s slated to change via the state’s west-east rail plans, whose Compass Rail vision features the town of 12,000.
With planning and design work funded, the state and the firm VHB New England have been identifying spots that allow trains to stop in the area without running afoul of local freight lines.
The freighters constantly flow through town on railroad company-owned tracks, past the downtown area and what was once the Union Station that served Palmer for the better part of a century.
It’s now the home of the Steaming Tender restaurant and where supporters of putting train platforms nearby rallied on Monday, broadcast by M-PACT TV.
Scarlet Lamothe is the restaurant’s general manager – as well as the public relations head for the Central Corridor Passenger Rail Coalition.
“We need to fight for Palmer right now, and for Palmer's economic growth and … Palmer's economic growth will not happen if it's not at the crossroads and not at the downtown location,” she said.
The Lamothe family has been restoring the site and building for years, with its high ceilings, large arches and tall windows that show freighters passing every so often.
They’ve also been calling for passenger rail to return to the site, which dates back to 1884. In its heyday, trains and mills were major economic engines for the town. According to an 1894 train schedule on display at the restaurant, you could take the Boston and Albany Railroad’s #13 train from Palmer to Greenbush and Albany, New York or other trains heading to the state capital and elsewhere.
At one point, there was also service going north and south – a concept restaurant owner and real estate developer Blake Lamothe, Scarlet’s father, is also fighting for, he tells WAMC.
“I don't think that MassDOT or the town has elaborated on the New England Central Line, from New London to Brattleboro, and as far as Montreal - nobody has talked about that, because they're just listening to MassDOT,” he alleged.
In a statement to WAMC, a MassDOT spokesperson said the Steaming Tender site and other spots were "eliminated as possible future station locations" due to them not meeting technical requirements.
Officials say a feasible site needs to accommodate an “800’ high-level platform on a 1,775’ siding track" and that “the rail corridor width adjacent to the Steaming Tender property is too narrow to accommodate the minimum infrastructure requirements for a new station.”
On top of that, a substantial amount of property would need to be acquired, on top of other tasks, as mentioned by a VHB official in December during a presentation at the Palmer Public Library.
The Lamothes dispute this, contending the site does have the space to accommodate platforms.
Blake says some property owners affected by the Union Station scenario would also likely accommodate the station needs if it meant restoring service to downtown Palmer. The Lamothes themselves own or operate businesses on several parcels in the immediate area.
What comes next for the pro-Union Station group is still being decided, though advocate and real estate investor John McElduff suggests future actions could take several forms, varying from contacting legislators to exploring legal action.
“The second one, legal action. It's expensive, it's time-consuming, but you know, it's possibly necessary, unfortunately,” he explained to dozens of locals who filled the restaurant Monday. “And third, local engagement. This would be a possible non-binding vote on where we should put the station. Should we put here, in the central business district? Or out, on the edge of town?”
For now, locals are waiting to hear from MassDOT and VHB as they decide on a preferred station location, based on evaluation criteria and feedback from the public.
One site proposal, east of Crane Hill Road and in Wilbraham, was recently eliminated by project officials after the December presentation, citing multiple issues, including the fact that it “had not received any community support neither written nor verbal,” according to the mass.gov “Palmer Station planning & design” page.
Another spot, the site of a town DPW lot, is relatively close to the old Union Station compared to other locations, but comes with its own issues. Most of the other sites are further away, down Route 20.
During her presentation, Scarlet Lamothe claimed putting a station any distance from the downtown could end up mimicking a situation in Windsor Locks, CT – where a park and ride stop some distance from the town’s center is being relocated to a more central location.
Carl Borden, a Wilbraham resident who says he liked Monday’s presentation, noted another spot near the town line with Brimfield also poses issues.
“As a choice, I'd rather have it at an old historic train station rather than at some… I know one of the locations was near a solar farm, which, how do you expand the parking there?” he told WAMC after the meeting. “You've already got most of the land taken up by a solar farm, which I have no problem with solar farms - just where the location was. Most of the other ones required some really convoluted moving around and, as someone who's aware that someday I'm going to need assistance, having a place that's already easy to [be] ADA compliant would be much better than the places where you have to go over the tracks, go under the tracks, go around the tracks.”
Borden added the Union Station site could have bottleneck issues due to a major junction being close by. That, and he understood an argument a rail expert at the meeting brought up, centered around there being an apparent lack of track length.
MassDOT anticipates new info on a preferred spot will be released “soon.”
