The first common carrier railroad chartered in New England, the Boston & Lowell was chartered in 1830 and began service in 1835. By 1853 it had acquired the Lowell & Lawrence RR which opened in 1848 essentially to keep it out of the hands of the Boston & Maine who would later acquire the Manchester and Lawrence line in 1887. Engineer and industrialist Charles Storer Storrow, prior to his achievements in Lawrence with the Essex company, designing and building the Great Stone Dam, being its first mayor, and president of the Essex Savings Bank among other things, successfully managed the Boston and Lowell Railroad for years.
As the rivalry with the B&M intensified the B&L built its own bridge across the Merrimack from 1878 to 1880 and its terminal at 326 Essex St. The bridge on the north side crossed the canal after a tunnel between the Atlantic Mills and the Lower Pacific. The depot was in the first floor of its the Romanesque style Opera House along with Western Union offices giving it direct access to downtown Lawrence. It was considered the most ornamental building in the city. By 1887 the B&L, unable to successfully compete, was leased to the B&M which ultimately would acquire most of the other smaller area railroads.
By the 1920s the B&M could no longer afford the luxury of the numerous parallel branch lines it had inherited from its predecessors, among which were two lines between Lowell and Lawrence. The B&M branch was retained, and the Lawrence & Lowell Branch was abandoned. Passenger train service to that depot ended in 1923 and all train service over the original B&L bridge ended by 1926. In 1931 the B&M built a new station on the south side of the river and closed the depot at Essex and Broadway also and the one at Andover and So Broadway. The Opera House building, considered a hazard, was demolished in the 1940s. The train bridge would be demolished in the 1950s though the foundations for the trestles are still there and visible in the river.