A fifth subsidiary was the never-completed Southern New England Railway, chartered in 1910, which would have run from a connection with the Central Vermont at Palmer, Massachusetts, to the deep-water, all-weather port of Providence, Rhode Island. A new line to Providence would have allowed for more extensive port facilities than were possible for the Central Vermont at New London, Connecticut. Construction began in 1910 and continued in fits and starts for more than 20 years until finally abandoned in the early 1930s because of the Great Depression. The loss of the SNER's strongest proponent, Grand Trunk Railway president Charles Melville Hays, on RMS Titanic in 1912 may have been the major reason that this new route to the sea was never completed. Another important factor was the unrelenting opposition of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, which fiercely protected its virtual monopoly control of rail traffic in southern New England.

Photographed by Bruce Macdonald, August 31, 1984.
Added to the photo archive by Bruce Macdonald, May 16, 2023.
Railroad: Grand Trunk.

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