Hampden Railroad by R P McCormick

Railroad plans showing the location of the Hampden Railroad in the County of Hampden, Mass through the Cities of Springfield & Chicopee and the towns of Ludlow & Palmer. Plans drawn by Durkee, White & Towne, Engineers - Springfield MA Oct 1911. Original scale 1 inch = 200 feet

In accordance with the provisions of Chapters 111 & 112 Part II Section 74 of the Revised Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Hampden Railroad Corporation makes and files this location of its railroad in the County of Hampden through the cities of Springfield and Chicopee and towns of Ludlow and Palmer in the said Commonwealth, as show on the accompanying map and description of alignment, which map and description are hereby made a part of this location.

Filed November 6, 1911 at the Clerk's Office of the County Commissioners.

The railroad plan books were received from the Office of the County Engineer by the Hampden County Registry of Deeds in 1998 and were subsequently digitized for Internet access by the Registrar.

The images comprising this gigapan were extracted as PNG's from the Registry's PDF. They were subsequently adjusted for magnetic north and converted from 1-bit images to 8-bit images. Photoshop was used to trim overlapping areas in the images and they were manually assembled into a multi-layer Photoshop document. The resultant image was saved in RAW format and uploaded to Gigapan.

The Hampden Railroad was built from Athol Jct in Springfield through Chicopee, Ludlow, Belchertown and Palmer to Hampden Jct in Bondsville MA. A good portion of the railroad right-of-way is now part of the Mass Pike I-90 between Exit 6 and the Ludlow rest areas to the east. The section of railroad from where the bridge was over the Chicopee River to the west to Chicopee Falls (connecting to the Boston & Maine Chicopee Falls Branch) was never built.