In April of last year we moved to our new house, which contains a partially finished basement with a room approximately 10' by 12' which we decided to designate as the railroad room. While this is smaller than the space I had at our old house, I felt that dealing with a smaller space had 2 advantages - one, it was a challenge to see if an interesting layout could be built in this space, and two, it would keep me from trying to build a bigger layout than I had time and energy for. Especially given my other interests such as the Worcester Model Railroaders.
After going through several track plans I had the idea of the Milton Branch and the Mattapan trolley. The idea originally came from a Train Simulator route I had been working on of Boston's MBTA Red Line, which I have never completed but got as far as adding the Mattapan trolley and the Milton Branch as an extra. This resulted in some research as to industries such as baker Chocolate.
I have also for some time wanted to build a trolley line and this seemed to be the perfect combination, where I also have a branch line with switching opportunities as well as the trolley - the best of both worlds.
An additional factor in choosing this prototype was the fact that in 1962 we moved to Dorchester. At the time I was attending a private school in Weest Roxbury which happily required that I ride the MBTA to and from school every day. Originally I would get the subway at Ashmont where I would see the Mattapan trolleys in operation. The ride took me through what was then an industrial part of Dorchester which I hope to represent with the industries modeled on the back portion of the layout along the Old Colony main.
I didn't actually ride the Mattapan trolley very much. One time that stands out is when we belonged to the YMCA near Codman Square which originally did not have its own pool, so we would travel to a pool in Mattapan to swim usually by a yellow school bus. One time there was no bus, so the counselors marched us over to Ashmont and put us on the trolley to Mattapan.
There was another time when my Mom took us with her to go to Mattapan to shop naturally by trolley as she didn't drive back then. Nowadays the area around there is rundown, but back then Mattapan was the center of a vibrant working class Jewish community that ran from Mattapan Square up Blue Hill Ave. and there were many stores around the square.
