At Salem Depot, the rail trail starts beside the town's 1867 station, a block from the Route 28 and Main Street intersection where traffic stacks up every afternoon. There hasn't been a train there in more than forty years. By next summer, a train car could be back.
On October 19, the Salem Town Council took up a plan to put a former Boston & Maine caboose next to the Salem Rail Trail, inside the Depot Park the town has proposed. The car has already been bought. Volunteers are raising the money to install it, and the target is summer 2027. The town's own schedule for the park doesn't break ground until 2028. So the caboose, a Phase 2 item in that plan, may be the first piece of the new Depot that people actually see.
The Car Is Already Bought and Paid For
The caboose belongs to the volunteers who look after the trail. The Council minutes call the group the Friends of the Salem Bike-Ped Corridor. Its president, Larry Belair, found the car, and the group bought it. Belair told councilors the caboose had passed through several owners over the years, and the Friends are now building a section of track for it. He put the total cost at about $150,000, and the plan includes repainting the car.
According to The Eagle-Tribune's report on the meeting, the car's current paint is about 20 years old, and the installation will be paid for entirely with donations. The paper also reported that Assistant Town Manager Colleen Mailloux had doubts at first:
"I will be honest I was skeptical on where we were going to find a caboose."
Councilor Paul Pelletier was more direct, according to the same report: "This is what the depot needs, this is what our community needs. It completes that whole section now."
The design puts the caboose on a platform held up by a retaining wall. It will be set at trail level, and it will arrive in sections and be assembled on site. Belair said people on the trail will be able to walk right up to it.
Why There Was a Caboose to Buy
Mailloux's doubts were reasonable. Railroads across the country stopped using cabooses around the 1980s. New technology replaced them, and the laws requiring them were repealed. The Eagle-Tribune reported that about 2,500 cabooses went up for sale, and Salem's is one of them. "Their loss is our gain," Belair told the Council.
Salem's own line shut down at almost the same time. The railroad through town began as the Manchester & Lawrence Railroad. It was chartered on July 31, 1847, opened to passengers in 1849 with a Salem station, and became part of the Boston & Maine in 1887. By the late 1930s, passenger service had shrunk to one round trip a day. Regular passenger service ended in July 1953, all trains stopped around 1980, and a substantial share of the track came out during the 1980s and 1990s. The decade that took cabooses off the rails nationally is the same one that ended rail service through Salem.
That history is laid out in a railroad survey quoted in a 2024 federal court filing about Derry's rail trail tunnel. It describes the Salem Depot as built in 1867 and the oldest of the three surviving depots on the old Manchester & Lawrence line. The building was used as a law office for years after passenger service ended. In 2009, the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources found the remaining corridor eligible for the National Register as the Manchester & Lawrence Railroad Historic District, and that district includes the Salem station.
The Town's Plan Put the Caboose in Phase 2
The caboose was always in the plan. The Eagle-Tribune reported that the town's conceptual redevelopment plan called for one to highlight the depot's railroad history. In the long-term funding and phasing plan the Council approved, presented by Crayton Brubaker of Community Development, the caboose sits in the second of five phases. The Eagle-Tribune summarized the schedule as running from 2028 through 2032, at an estimated total of $3.5 million, paid for with state grants, taxes, donations and fundraising.
The order of phases, as reported:
- Phase 1, Main Street. Better parking, a playground, a welcome sign, and restrooms with storage. Estimated at about $1.06 million, with $520,000 expected from a Land and Water Conservation Fund grant. If the grant comes through, work could start in 2028.
- Phase 2, North Broadway. A gazebo, a fountain and landscaping, plus a renovated caboose or display arcade. No grant is expected for this phase, so it depends on donations.
- Phase 3, Route 28 frontage. A picnic and food truck area, screening plants, landscaping in front of the Veteran's Plaza, and decorative fencing and lighting. Work isn't expected before 2030, and the town plans to apply for a second grant of $488,000 in 2028.
- Phases 4 and 5. Still conceptual. They include 1,200 square feet of retail space paid for by a private developer, plus more parking along Route 28.
In the town's draft plan, Phase 1 is at 70 and 80 Main Street. Phase 2 is at 1 North Broadway, where it carries a $175,313 line item for a "caboose / display arcade with retaining wall." That line item and Belair's estimate of about $150,000 come from different documents and may not cover the same scope. The plan left the option open. Designers proposed either a train station-themed arcade or a caboose for the Broadway frontage. The Friends settled that by finding a car.
Phase 2 was always going to depend on donations, and a volunteer group that had already bought the car took that job on. That's why the target moved from 2028 or later to summer 2027.
What Still Has to Happen First
The summer 2027 date is a target. Town Manager Joseph Devine attached a "barring any complications" condition to it. These steps are still ahead:
- State approval. The caboose will sit on land owned by the New Hampshire Department of Transportation, so the state has to sign off.
- Formal acceptance by the town. The Eagle-Tribune reported that the Council will formally accept the donation in the spring. The minutes say acceptance is expected next year.
- Site preparation. The town's recap of the meeting says approvals and site work need to be done before acceptance.
- Fundraising. The repaint is already budgeted. The group is still raising donations for the installation.
The Trail Gap Is Scheduled for Summer 2027 Too
The caboose isn't the only change planned for the Depot in 2027. At an August 3 public hearing, the town and its consultant GPI presented preliminary designs for Phases IV and V of the Salem Rail Trail. That's the one-mile stretch from Main Street to Rockingham Park Boulevard that links two finished sections of the corridor.
According to the August 3 Council minutes, the design includes at-grade crossings at Via Toscana and Central Street, five bench areas with bike racks and shade trees, mile markers, and a kiosk across from the Veteran's Plaza near Main Street. At the north end, the trail surface will match the section by the Depot train station. Tuscan Village paid for the design, and construction costs are split between a federal CMAQ grant, which covers 80 percent, and Tuscan, which covers 20. Construction was expected to begin in August 2027, though permitting could push it back. The Eagle-Tribune reported that finishing this phase would bring the paved trail to about three of its roughly five miles. Earlier sections were paved in 2016 and 2018.
If both projects hold to schedule, the caboose would be in place at the north end just as work begins on the link toward Tuscan Village. People walking south from the Depot would pass the car on their way to the new crossings. The playground, gazebo and food truck area would come later. For more on that end of the corridor, see our guide to living near Tuscan Village.
The Corridor This November
For now, the Depot end of the trail is where it has always been, beside the old station. The Friends of the Salem Rail Trail describe the full route as 5.2 miles. The north-end Salem trailhead gives access to both paved and gravel sections. At the south end, the Methuen gateway has parking on Hampshire Road just west of Route 28, and there's a separate access and parking point at the Windham line. The Friends also note that the trail is the southern start of the Granite State Rail Trail, which runs about 120 miles north to Lebanon. Heading north, it links to the trail our earlier post called the busiest in New Hampshire.
The Friends' website is also the most direct way to reach the group behind the caboose while it raises installation money.
At DiPietro Group Real Estate, we keep track of how projects like the Depot Village plan change the parts of town our clients see every day. If you'd like to know how the Depot and rail trail plans could affect a home near Main Street or Route 28, schedule a free buyer or seller consultation with our team, or start with our Salem neighborhood page.
