THE IRON ROAD
ACROSS THE SAND
NHA
Nantucket Railroad Locomotive No. 2 pulls a passenger coach along Easy Street in 1915, passing a busy harbor filled with fishing vessels. Old North Wharf is at right, while the steamer Sankaty and several trawlers are tied up at Steamboat Wharf to the left.
Nantucket’s narrow-gauge railroad began as a bet on tourism and real estate, carried tens of thousands of passengers from town to Surfside and ’Sconset, fought the Atlantic for nearly four decades, and disappeared just as the automobile arrived
By Don Costanzo • August 6, 2026
Long before Nantucket debated vehicle limits, ferry reservations, downtown parking and the summer crawl along Sparks Avenue, the island tried another way of moving people. It put them on a train.
On the Fourth of July in 1881, hundreds gathered near the foot of Main Street to see something Nantucket had never seen before: a steam locomotive decorated with flags, its bell ringing, its whistle sounding and smoke rising over the harbor. The locomotive was called Dionis, named for Dionis Coffin, wife of early Nantucket settler Tristram Coffin. Behind it were a tender and passenger cars waiting to make the railroad’s inaugural run from the waterfront to Surfside.
Among the first passengers were 70-year-old Charles Joy, who reportedly had never seen a locomotive in motion, and Captain Charles H. Coleman, who was more than 80. As Dionis began moving, the crowd cheered. The trip was only about four miles, but to an island still emerging from the collapse of whaling, it must have appeared to be a journey directly into the future.
The railroad would survive for just 36 years of passenger service. During that time, it would help create Surfside as a resort destination, contribute to the expansion of ’Sconset, carry thousands of residents and visitors across the island, endure washouts and derailments, change ownership and names, experiment unsuccessfully with gasoline-powered railcars and become one of the most improbable small railroads in America.
Its final passenger train ran in September 1917. The tracks were removed the following spring. But the railroad never entirely disappeared.
Parts of its route remain visible in the curve of Easy Street, a walking path through the Goose Pond marsh, the angle of buildings near Orange Street, raised ground behind Lower Pleasant Street, remnants beside Hinsdale Road, portions of Station Street in Surfside and a long diagonal corridor running through what is now Nantucket Memorial Airport.
And one of its passenger cars still stands at the foot of Main Street.
NHA
Clockwise from top, left: A crowd watches railroad cars being brought ashore at Commercial Wharf on May 29, 1910. Philip H. Folger, the businessman credited with advancing the Nantucket Railroad and builder of the Folger Block at Main and Orange streets, photographed in the 1860s. William D. “Billy” Clark, Nantucket’s celebrated town crier and newspaper seller, with the tin horn he used to announce arriving steamers, headlines, auctions and other news. In 1881, Clark ceremonially drove one of the railroad’s first spikes near Steamboat Wharf. Four laborers lay and reinforce track for the Nantucket Railroad during the 1880s.
A Railroad Built to Create a New Nantucket
The Nantucket Railroad was not originally conceived as public transportation in the modern sense. It was, above all, an instrument of development.
By the second half of the 19th century, Nantucket’s whaling economy had collapsed. The island had lost much of its population, businesses had closed and those who remained were looking for a new economic future. Increasingly, that future appeared to be summer tourism. Hotels and boarding houses began attracting visitors seeking beaches, ocean air and relief from mainland heat. Developers also began buying large tracts of comparatively inexpensive island land, dividing them into house lots and promoting entirely new summer communities.
The problem was transportation. Visitors arriving by steamer could stay in town, but reaching the south shore or the eastern end of the island required a long trip by horse and carriage over rough roads. A railroad could change that. More importantly for its investors, it could make distant land marketable.
The idea is generally credited to Philip H. Folger, a Boston businessman with Nantucket family connections. Folger began assembling investors and advancing plans around 1879. Contemporary newspaper records also credit John H. Morton and Charles F. Coffin with carrying out the project.
Early surveys considered a much more ambitious route west toward Madaket and then east along the south shore to ’Sconset. That was abandoned in favor of an initial line from Nantucket Town to Surfside, where developers believed a new seaside resort could be created.
At roughly the same time, Henry Coffin and Charles G. Coffin formed the Nantucket-Surfside Land Company. Their holdings stretched approximately three miles along the south shore, from the vicinity of Weweeder Pond toward Tom Nevers Head. Maps divided the property into an enormous grid of proposed house lots.
The railroad and the land company were therefore parts of the same enterprise. The railroad would bring prospective buyers to the beach. The hotel, depot and restaurant would give them a destination. The land company would then sell them a piece of the new Surfside.
Construction preparations began in 1880. Rails, ties — then commonly called sleepers — and other materials were brought across the water. A crew of 26 laborers built the roadbed, bridged Goose Pond and pushed the line toward Surfside. The track was laid to a gauge of three feet, considerably narrower than the standard American railroad gauge of four feet, eight-and-a-half inches. Narrow-gauge railroads could be built more cheaply, used lighter equipment and negotiated tighter curves. Those advantages were important on a small seasonal railroad with limited capital.
They also meant that Nantucket’s equipment could not operate on standard mainland tracks. Every locomotive, car, rail and replacement part had to be brought to the island by vessel.
The project was not universally welcomed. When town crier William “Billy” Clark ceremonially drove a railroad spike at Steamboat Wharf in May 1881, opponents reportedly hung black crepe from their business windows. Some feared the train would disrupt existing carriage and hospitality businesses. Others regarded it as another speculative scheme being imposed on the island.
NHA
Top left: Passengers gather outside the Surfside railroad station in the 1880s, waiting for the train that connected Nantucket Town with the island’s developing south-shore resort. Bottom left: Nantucket Railroad Engine No. 2 travels toward Surfside along the Washington Street waterfront. Right: Moved from Rhode Island and rebuilt at Surfside in 1883, the four-story Surfside Hotel became the centerpiece of the railroad’s planned seaside resort. Guests gather on its veranda in this 1890 view, with a lawn-tennis net visible in front. The hotel collapsed in 1899.
From Steamboat Wharf to Surfside
The first railroad terminal stood near Steamboat Wharf, in the waterfront area around the present foot of Main Street, Straight Wharf and Easy Street.
From there the train followed the harbor southward, curving along the alignment now reflected by Easy Street. It continued near Washington Street, crossed the low marsh and the Goose Pond causeway, passed through the Orange Street and Lower Pleasant Street area and continued across farmland and open country toward Surfside.
There was no Mid-Island commercial district, no airport complex and no dense network of surrounding roads. Much of the trip passed through open fields, marshes and moors.
At Surfside, the railroad company built a depot and restaurant. Two years later, the massive four-story Surfside Hotel opened on July 4, 1883. Its structure had been moved in sections from Rhode Island and reconstructed near the beach. The railroad delivered visitors almost to the hotel’s door. The land company operated a real-estate office at the depot. By the end of 1882, approximately 180 lots had reportedly been sold.
But the thousands of proposed cottages never appeared. Surfside became a popular beach and excursion destination, but not the fully built resort community its promoters had imagined. The train itself was an immediate attraction. A round-trip ticket to Surfside cost 35 cents. Historic accounts estimate that the railroad carried more than 30,000 passenger trips during its first season and traveled nearly 6,000 train-miles.
During the large Coffin family reunion in August 1881, more than 3,000 people were reportedly transported to and from Surfside in a single day. That was an extraordinary number for an island whose year-round population was then only a fraction of what it is today.
Not everyone celebrated its success. Within weeks of the opening, two apparent attempts were made to wreck the train. In one case, someone tried to interfere with a railroad tie placed across the track. In another, a large stone was discovered and removed before the train arrived.
The railroad would become famous for derailments, mechanical failures, runaway cars and embarrassing mishaps. Nevertheless, one modern history reports that only two people were killed by the train during its entire operating life.
Clockwise from top, left: Captain Jack Killen, driving a golden spike, to connect the newly replaced rails at Siasconset. 1909. The train at 'Sconset station, with a few passengers standing by, 1890s. antucket Railroad train arriving at Sconset. Stairway down from the bluff is in the foreground. Nantucket Central Railroad: first train to Siasconset on Easy Street, 1909.
NHA
The Line Reaches ’Sconset
Surfside had been the railroad’s first destination, but ’Sconset became its most important.
In 1884, the track was extended east from Surfside along the south shore. It passed through or near Nobadeer, Madequecham and Tom Nevers before curving around the eastern end of the island and reaching a station below the bluff in ’Sconset.
At its greatest extent, the shore route was approximately ten miles long. Contemporary plans described a line of about 10¼ miles from town to the south shore and then east to Siasconset.
The journey connected the steamboat landing with two emerging summer districts. A visitor could arrive in Nantucket Town, transfer almost directly to the train and be delivered to the beach, a hotel or a rented cottage without hiring a horse and carriage.
Developer Edward Underhill is widely credited with helping secure the extension to ’Sconset. Underhill had acquired land south of the old fishing village and developed cottages for summer visitors. William Flagg, another major ’Sconset developer, was building north of the historic village.
Unlike the speculative grids at Surfside, development around ’Sconset endured. The railroad did not create the village, which had existed for generations, but it made the eastern end of Nantucket far more accessible and helped accelerate its transformation into a summer colony.
The ’Sconset station was relatively modest and stood near the base of the bluff. The track approached along the beach. Because the railroad’s principal turntable and engine facilities were back in town, trains sometimes made the return journey with the locomotive operating in reverse.
The railroad primarily carried passengers, but it also moved baggage, mail, supplies and some freight. Historic photographs show cars carrying lumber or timber toward ’Sconset, evidence that the line supported construction as well as tourism.
Left: The original locomotive Dionis stands at the Surfside station with two passenger cars as riders disembark. Right:The gasoline-powered railcar known as the “Bug,” coupled to its open trailer, the “Bird Cage,” at Easy Street near Old North Wharf.
NHA
The Trains Nantucket Rode
Nantucket never possessed a large or standardized fleet. The railroad was chronically short of money and depended heavily on secondhand equipment.
Its first locomotive, Dionis, was built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia and had previously operated briefly on an Illinois railroad. Before arriving on Nantucket, it was fitted with a spark arrestor intended to prevent cinders from igniting the island’s pine groves. The locomotive, tender and two cars arrived by barge on July 1, 1881, only three days before the inaugural run.
Early trains included wooden, open-sided excursion cars, similar in appearance to the cars later associated with amusement parks and sightseeing railroads. Enclosed coaches and combination passenger-and-baggage cars were added as the railroad developed.
Later steam locomotives included one named Sconset, acquired secondhand from the Boston, Revere Beach and Lynn Railroad, and locomotives known more simply as Engine No. 1 and Engine No. 2. Railroad rosters differ in some minor details, but they agree that Nantucket relied predominantly on small, used narrow-gauge steam equipment until the final years.
The line’s most unusual equipment arrived during an early attempt to replace steam power with gasoline. A small gasoline-powered railcar known as The Bug could carry only about six to ten passengers, depending upon the account. It could reach ’Sconset in approximately 19 minutes, considerably faster than the steam train.
The Bug pulled a small companion trailer or baggage car nicknamed the Bird Cage. Photographs show both vehicles filled with passengers, looking less like a conventional train than an improvised trolley assembled for an island fairground.
The Bug was eventually wrecked after tipping over. A larger gasoline railcar capable of carrying about 30 passengers was introduced afterward, but it vibrated so violently on the uneven track that it was returned to the mainland. By 1909, the company had returned to steam.
​
A Railroad at War With the Atlantic
The railroad’s greatest adversary was not the automobile. For most of its history, automobiles were not even permitted on Nantucket. Its greatest adversary was the ocean.
The Surfside-to-’Sconset route had been placed along one of the most exposed stretches of the island. Much of the roadbed rested on sand only a short distance from the Atlantic. Winter storms repeatedly undermined, buried or washed away the track.
Crews returned each spring to clear sand, reopen drainage channels, repair bridges, replace ties and rebuild sections that had disappeared during the winter. That meant the railroad began each short operating season with substantial expenses before collecting its first fare.
In 1887, part of the line was moved farther inland. In 1888, another storm washed sections into the surf. By 1890, the company was petitioning for permission to move approximately 1,000 feet of track away from the beach. In August 1893, a major storm damaged the line around Nobadeer, Madequecham and Tom Nevers. During the aftermath, Dionis left the damaged track and went into the breakwater or surf, producing one of the most memorable images in the railroad’s accident-prone history.
The financial damage was harder to repair than the locomotive.
In 1894 and 1895, the original Nantucket Railroad entered bankruptcy and was reorganized as the Nantucket Central Railroad. Its owners made the most consequential decision in the line’s history: they abandoned the exposed Surfside section.
The new inland route continued from the waterfront through the Washington Street and Orange Street area, but then turned toward Sparks Avenue and Fairgrounds Road. From there it crossed what is now Nantucket Memorial Airport, ran diagonally across the interior of the island and rejoined the eastern portion of the old route near Tom Nevers before continuing to ’Sconset.
Surfside was left without rail service. The hotel had already failed as a business and was deteriorating. It collapsed in 1899.
The inland route was safer from the Atlantic, but it could not solve the railroad’s underlying economic problem. The line operated mainly during a brief summer season. Equipment, rails and structures required continuous maintenance. Nearly everything had to be brought across the water. And the real-estate developments that had justified the original investment had produced mixed results.
The company changed hands and names several times: the Nantucket Railroad, the Nantucket Central Railroad and, after another reorganization around 1909, the Nantucket Railroad once again. The names changed more easily than the balance sheet. ​​
Reginald F. Hussey at the wheel of one of Nantucket’s early automobiles in the 1920s, a symbol of the transportation era that followed the railroad. Right: The Surfside Hotel after part of the building collapsed in 1899, with a bicyclist standing amid the ruins of the railroad-era resort.
NHA
Why the Railroad Ended
It’s tempting to say that the automobile killed the Nantucket Railroad, but the real story is more complicated.
For much of the early 20th century, Nantucket actively resisted motor vehicles. After years of local controversy, a special automobile ban was enacted in 1908, preventing ordinary motor-vehicle use on island roads. The prohibition remained in place until the spring of 1918.
The railroad therefore did not spend its final decade competing with a large fleet of private cars. It failed largely on its own economics. It had never generated dependable profits. It was seasonal, expensive to maintain and burdened by aging equipment. Storm damage remained a recurring threat. Its principal destinations could also be reached by increasingly improved roads and horse-drawn vehicles.
Then the United States entered World War I. The war drove up the value of rails, locomotives and other scrap metal. Suddenly, the physical railroad was worth more dismantled than its owners believed it was worth operating.
The last passenger trip was made in September 1917. During the spring of 1918, the rails were lifted and most of the equipment was sold for wartime use. Accounts state that locomotives, cars and railroad material were transported to Bordeaux, France, to support the Allied war effort.
That explains the apparent disagreement over the railroad’s ending date. Passenger service ended in 1917, and the railroad was physically dismantled and disposed of in 1918. It is therefore commonly described as having operated from 1881 to 1918.
On May 15, 1918, Nantucket voters narrowly approved the return of automobiles. State records identify the resulting legislation as an act permitting motor vehicles in the Town of Nantucket. Within approximately ten days, historical accounts say 24 automobiles and an automobile dealer had arrived on the island.
One shared transportation system had disappeared. Thousands of individual vehicles would eventually take its place.
What Happened to the Tracks?
The rails themselves were pulled up, sold and shipped away. Ties were removed, reused, abandoned or gradually buried. Bridges and culverts disappeared. Sections of roadbed were absorbed into private property, new roads, commercial sites, the airport and residential neighborhoods. Coastal portions were claimed by erosion.
What survives today is less a continuous railroad corridor than a series of fragments and shapes in the landscape.
At the harbor, Easy Street follows part of the old waterfront alignment. Its long, gentle curve reflects the geometry required by a train, which could not make the sharp turns of a wagon or automobile. South of town, the Goose Pond causeway survives as a dirt walking path through the marsh. Nearby, Hatch’s Package Store sits at an unusual angle because the building was constructed parallel to the old railroad right-of-way rather than square to Orange Street.
The route continues diagonally behind the Cape Cod Five property on Lower Pleasant Street. Near Hinsdale Road, raised sections of the former roadbed can still be identified beneath brush and vegetation. Hinsdale itself served as a maintenance way alongside the tracks.
Farther south, the original line entered Surfside. Part of its curvature is still reflected around Station Street, although development, road construction and more than a century of erosion have obscured much of the route.
After the 1895 realignment, the railroad crossed the land now occupied by Nantucket Memorial Airport. The old route then ran southeast toward Tom Nevers. Houses, neighborhood streets, private parcels and open land now occupy the corridor.
Near Tom Nevers Head, traces of the right-of-way can still be followed through some marshy areas. The railroad once bisected a large proposed subdivision there, complete with a depot and Tom Nevers Lodge, where prospective buyers could look out over the available lots. Today, the old speculative tract has become a densely developed residential neighborhood.
Near ’Sconset, portions of the beach route and station area have been altered or lost to erosion and development. The train once approached along the shore and stopped beneath the bluff. There is no station, track or obvious terminal remaining today.
One bit of island lore claims that a derailed locomotive was never recovered and remains buried beneath Washington Street near the present municipal annex area. The story has been repeated for years, but we found no reliable documentary evidence confirming it. It should be regarded as folklore rather than established history.
Left: The former Nantucket Railroad passenger coach incorporated into Allen’s Restaurant and Diner at the foot of Main Street. Right: The same historic railcar survives today as the centerpiece of the Club Car, one of the last visible remnants of Nantucket’s railroad era.
The Train Car That Stayed Behind
Although most of the railroad was dismantled and shipped overseas, one passenger coach remained on Nantucket. It later became part of Allen’s Lobster Grill and Diner at the foot of Main Street and, in 1977, the centerpiece of the Club Car restaurant. Still operating seasonally at 1 Main Street, the Club Car is the most visible surviving piece of the Nantucket Railroad. Other artifacts, including the bell from the locomotive Dionis, are preserved by the Nantucket Historical Association.
It is tempting to view the railroad as a lost answer to Nantucket’s modern traffic problems. But the more important lesson is that it was built to encourage growth. It carried visitors to undeveloped parts of the island so investors could build hotels, sell land and create new summer communities. Transportation did not simply serve development, it enabled it.
That remains true today. Ferry capacity, parking, roads, shuttles and other transportation decisions shape how many people and vehicles the island can absorb. The difference is that the railroad concentrated travelers into a shared system. The automobile scattered them among thousands of individual vehicles.
Nantucket is not going to rebuild a railway to ’Sconset. Much of the route has been developed, divided among private properties, absorbed by the airport or lost to erosion. But the railroad demonstrated that large numbers of people could move across the island without each bringing a vehicle of their own.
The train also imposed a natural limit: only so many trips, cars and passengers could be accommodated. The automobile brought freedom and convenience, but it left the question of limits to the community, a question Nantucket has struggled to answer ever since.
As the railroad was being dismantled in 1918, an unidentified Inquirer and Mirror writer mourned its passing: “Most everybody had rather hear Dionis whistle than Ford honk.”
More than a century later, in traffic on Sparks Avenue or backed up at the rotary, Nantucket may understand that sentiment better than ever.
Imagining the Railroad in Color
These photographs were taken in black and white, but they invite a natural question: what would Nantucket’s railroad era have looked like in real life if color film had existed? The images below are colorized interpretations of several historic scenes, offering a more immediate sense of the trains, stations, hotel and harbor that once shaped island life.
