The Gulf of Maine is an international watershed in the North Atlantic stretching north from Provincetown at the tip of Massachusetts Bay in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to Cape Sable on the Bay of Fundy in the province of Nova Scotia in Canada. For over 13,000 years, the Gulf has been developed around access to the coast for fishing, trading, and recreation. Today, these coastal development patterns put the cultural landscapes, economies, communities, and aging infrastructure systems along the Gulf at risk.
Climate Futures on the Gulf of Maine uses place-based scenario planning to illustrate the risks, vulnerabilities, and plausible futures for ten infrastructure systems along the rim of the Gulf. Place-based scenario planning is a method of long-term strategic planning that creates representations of multiple, plausible futures that are used to inform decision-making in the present. While complementary to probabilistic models used to forecast future vulnerabilities, scenario-based planning shifts emphasis from statistical probability to ways of thinking about the future. The goal of place-based scenario planning is not to predict the most likely outcome, but to reveal biases and blind spots in complex and non-linear situations.
Climate Futures uses the medium of landscape representation to surface the cultural value systems embedded in existing infrastructural systems, and position landscape as a driver when evaluating design from individual infrastructures to the Gulf of Maine watershed.
Systems > Rail
RAIL
Rail infrastructure across the Gulf of Maine includes tracks, bridges, tunnels, maintenance facilities, freight and commuter terminals, marine, 1 and light rail. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rail travel was the connective tissue across the Gulf watershed.
Railroads were developed to transport passengers, goods, services, and to support the development of extractive industries like logging in the northern areas of the Gulf. Railways proved more cost effective than historic water routes like rivers and canals that froze during the winter, and were laid across the Gulf to connect cities and towns. The tracks were often constructed on berms through low-lying areas like marshes that were not yet developed. These systems now face the same vulnerabilities as low-lying roads at increasing risk of flooding 2 and washouts, and present the same environmental issues as barriers to fish passage and wildlife crossings.
Today, the majority of the railways in the Gulf of Maine have been abandoned, disinvested, sold, privatized, and many have been converted into recreational rail trails. Passenger train service is provided from Boston to Portland, Maine on the Amtrak Downeaster line, and from Montreal to Halifax through St. John’s and Truro on Via Railway Ocean line. Calls to revitalize these systems for increased commercial and passenger service must contend with deferred maintenance issues, regulations to ensure that passenger trains receive priority over freight on shared tracks, and financing that supports rail investment. 3
Rail travel on the Gulf of Maine reflects the challenges of reversing patterns of disinvestment in these systems after a shift toward automobile transport and highway development in the post-war period, while simultaneously adapting these systems to increase connectivity for humans and wildlife alike. 4
1 Landscape historian John Stilgoe describes the marine railway as a lower-cost alternative that was constructed across the Gulf, and defines the term “marine railway – its name certainly hints at British origins, for no one calls it a marine railroad – is just that, a railway. Parallel steel rails often twelve feet apart lay spiked across great beams of row, beams everyone calls sleepers – another British term – never ties. On the rails rides a carriage – not a car – with a cable attached to each end. Inland from the carriage, the cable runs between rails to a winding machine, often securely housed in a building and usually anchored to massive rocks of poured-in-place cement. Seaward runs another cable, snaking between two rails into and under the water to a block – what a landsman calls a pulley – anchored far out in the depths, usually to a massive stone but sometimes to a piling, and then around, back inshore, and up beneath the carriage, parallel to the landward cable, to the winding machine. Like an old style apartment-house clothesline on pulleys, therefore, the cable enables the winding machine to pull the carriage seaward and then under water, ad then to pull it back again onto land. At first glance, the mechanism appears extremely simple, and undoubtedly mid-nineteenth century boatbuilders and shipbuilders found it simpler than many other techniques.” Marine railways are still in service along the coast, but have largely been replaced since boat trailers were developed in the 1950s. John Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994): 192-197.
2 Engineers, urban planners, and economists evaluated Boston’s T system and commuter rails, finding that individual stations are vulnerable to sea level rise and storm surge impacts, as well as tracks constructed through vulnerable areas. Critically, they note that adaptation measures at nodes in rail systems are ultimately insufficient if the connecting tracks between them are not adapted at the same time. Michael V. Martello et al., “Evaluation of Climate Change Resilience for Boston’s Rail Rapid Transit Network,” Transportation Research 97 (2021): 102908.
3 American Society of Engineers, “A Comprehensive Assessment of America’s Infrastructure,” Infrastructure Report Card (New York, N.Y.: American Society of Engineers, 2025).
4 John Stilgoe, Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2009).