MBTA In Court Over Lawsuit Involving MA Central Rail Build

SUDBURY, MA — A Land Court judge is set to decide Thursday whether to dismiss a lawsuit over a former rail corridor in Sudbury and Hudson where Eversource is burying power lines — and that will eventually become the newest leg of the Mass Central Rail Trail.

Two Hudson companies backed by the group Protect Sudbury sued the MBTA in January in an attempt to prove they have an ownership interest in the rail corridor. The MBTA purchased the corridor in the 1970s from a defunct freight rail company intending to build a new commuter rail line.

The Protect Sudbury Land Court lawsuit is part of a complicated legal plan to stop the Eversource project by proving that the rail line is abandoned, allowing abutters to claim pieces of the corridor as their own.

If the plaintiffs Borg Brothers, LLC, and Most Noble, LLC, can prove they have an interest in the 1977 "order of taking" — the legal term for how the MBTA acquired the land — then they might be able to convince the federal Surface Transportation Board to take a fresh look at the case.

The STB previously declined to take on the case, but said it might if the "landowners are successful in invalidating the [order of taking] and establishing that they hold reversionary rights."

But in a request for dismissal, the MBTA has said the LLCs lack the ability to sue because both purchased their properties many years after the MBTA took possession of the rail corridor. The MBTA is arguing that the Hudson companies don't have grounds to sue at all.

The suit initially included plaintiffs from Sudbury, but Protect Sudbury asked a judge to dismiss the case so it could be re-filed with just plaintiffs from Hudson.

Protect Sudbury has previously lost challenges to the Eversource project in front of the state Energy Facilities Siting Board and the state Supreme Court. The Eversource project, which broke ground in the fall, will bury transmission lines between a substation near Landham Road and another facility in Hudson. After Eversource finishes that work, the corridor will be paved and become the newest link along the Boston-to-Northampton Massachusetts Central Rail Trail.

Protect Sudbury's President Ray Phillips has previously said the group is only opposed to the Eversource portion of the project and hasn't taken a position on the rail trail.