Part 1
Transcriber’s Note:
● Italics in the original are noted by _underscores_. ● Small capitals in the original are converted to ALL CAPS. ● Ditto marks (“) in tables or lists with train details have been replaced with the text they represent. ● Obvious typos have been corrected.
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EDAVILLE RAILROAD
by Linwood W. Moody
EDAVILLE RAILROAD
The Cranberry Belt
by
Linwood W. Moody
(_The photographs illustrating this book were taken by Cyrus Hosmer 3D, 34 Chester Road, Belmont 78, Massachusetts; Linwood W. Moody, Union, Maine; and Ellis D. Atwood, South Carver, Massachusetts, and are credited accordingly._)
Published by
Ellis D. Atwood
South Carver, Massachusetts
1947
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[Illustration: MAP OF THE EDAVILLE R.R. SO. CARVER, MASS.]
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FOREWORD
_Edaville Railroad_ isn’t a complete story of Ellis D. Atwood’s midget cranberry line. It isn’t an all-time history of the odd and colorful little roads that preceded it and of which the _Cranberry Belt_ is the last and final survivor.
A while ago Mr. Atwood suggested writing-up his Lilliputian carrier for the benefit of his host of visitors who aren’t as familiar as we are with such abbreviated railroad sizes. Something concise yet generally explanatory, answering most of the questions that might pop into your mind. Something to give you a fairly good idea of what the Edaville Railroad is and what its forebears have been. Something complete enough to cover the subject in a cursory way and still be printed to sell for the price of a ticket at Edaville, if he was selling tickets here.
No book has ever been written telling completely, in words or pictures, the all-time story of these diminutive lines. Maybe sometime one will be, and your reception to this booklet could be a deciding factor.
However, _Edaville Railroad_ will be a helpful guide-book for your visit here and your ride on the Tom Thumb train. Or, if you aren’t already down here, it will show you what you’re missing!
LINWOOD W. MOODY
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INTRODUCTION
I don’t like this--prefatory pages in books. Why can’t we speak our piece in the main text without expecting a feller to wade through Forewords, Prefaces, and Prologues? We can, if our gray-matter is agile enough.
But--my _Introduction_!
The world’s railroads aren’t all the same, you know. Width of track, or _gauge_, varies. Standard gauge, as ’most everyone knows, is four-feet, eight-and-one-half inches between the rails and there are plenty of hypotheses about how it got that way.
A few roads are wider than standard--five-feet, and five-and-a-half. Years ago you could even go all the way from New York to Chicago on tracks six feet wide. England once made merry on some _seven_ foot gauge.
Narrower gauge was much more common. Three feet and three-and-a-half once claimed thousands of miles. Why! In Grandpa’s day there were no less than thirty-seven different gauges of track in our fair land, and Lord only knows how many the foreign countries had, with their millimeters and other measuring sticks. Today, in North America, the four-feet, eight-and-a-half-inchers have pretty well switched the non-standard lines off the railroad map.
Of our own 227,000 miles of line 99-1/2 per cent is standard gauge, a scant 932 being something else--724 of it the Colorado three-footers. On only 380 miles is there a semblance of passenger service! Of Canada’s 42,000 miles, 90 is narrow gauge--the three-foot White Pass & Yukon Route. Mexico, however, hangs onto her slim gauge a little better and 2,400 of her total 12,600 miles of road is three-feet wide. The 809 mile Newfoundland Railway, three-and-a-half feet narrow, is likewise prosperously content with its non-conformity.
Of the whole world’s railway mileage, 788,000--but let’s not get too involved here. Anyway, foreign lands still consider economical transportation more important than the distance between the rails, and many miles of narrow tracks still thread hill and dale beyond the seas.
The very narrowest of them all, excepting some industrial tramway or miniature freak, was the vaunted two-footer. Sixty-centimeter, they call ’em over there, which is just another way of saying twenty-three and five-eighths inches. England had a few, and France has her famous “decaville” railways. The far East, Africa, and Australia still run generous two-foot mileage, and Latin America is pretty fond of the little cusses.
Up here in our country, half a century ago, they blossomed like roses at sunrise, bloomed lustily through the morning, but wilted ere there’d been time for the winds of Fate to blow their pollen around in good shape.
The top-puff midgets were the stout little virtuosi up in Maine. Their bantam chests jingled merrily with medals they’d won. A few scattered hybrids did some anemic bush-pushing elsewhere--one in Pennsylvania, one in New Mexico, and a third in Colorado’s icy mountains. They weren’t _real_ railroads, though. Either industrial outfits or kind of street-carrish affairs. That’s why I skipped ’em here. Had to draw the line somewhere.
The ten two-footers in Maine boasted about 212 miles of line. They were built and run like the big railroads. Had freight, and passenger trains. Were governed by the same laws and regulations. And were immensely vital to the loves and lives of the neighborhood. Their smoky smells were just as alluring and they could holler just as loud. I always thought they were a bit more democratic and hail-fellow-well-met than the more decorous grownups. Colorful, and kind of dramatic, too!
They passed, not because folks wanted all railroads alike. Not because they didn’t measure up. Worse than that. They limped into the sunset because people didn’t use them any more. Their _gauge_ made no difference. Plenty of standard gauges puffed into the limbo too. Neither could run without money. The two-footers stood it longer than their more expensive relatives of wider size. No. Their narrow gauge wasn’t the reason although the standardization tycoons beefed about non-conformity and the cost of transferring freight.
The decade of the 1930’s saw them go. For a while longer the Bridgton line and the little Monson were tolerated by some and cherished by a few, but when clouds of Peace darkened the war-red sky they were gone--the last two-footer had whistled off leaving only memory-trains to scoot through the mid-regions of the past.
That’s why the Edaville Railroad stands out. Why it’s a splendid anti-climax to an era of colorful midget railroading. Not so much because it’s the last survivor, as I persist in calling it, as a resurrection--an ideal risen from the ashes of Yesterday.
Here it is: not a synthetical reproduction but those very same engines and cars that made railroad history for three generations, alive and puffing again on Ellis Atwood’s eighteen-hundred acres. A seed from history that now blooms with the cranberries, sprouting in that same sand that perennializes faded shrubs from the Holy Commonwealth, Plymouth Colony, America in the making.
That’s why I had to have an _Introduction_. All right?
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EDAVILLE RAILROAD
THE CRANBERRY BELT
Well, well, well; just look at this--
The Edaville Railroad. Eighteen hundred acres long and only two feet wide!
Let’s look it over. There’s nothing like it anywhere. As if Plymouth County and the town of Carver weren’t famous enough already, not to mention Ellis Atwood’s model cranberry plantation, this little narrow gauge railroad now vies with cranberry crops and _Mayflower_ packets in spectacular “firsts”.
Plymouth, you know, is famous far and wide for being the stern and rockbound coast where the Pilgrims debarked three hundred and twenty-seven years ago. That’s Fourth Grade stuff. Also pretty well known, this historical region is first in world cranberry growing. Yes. Grows more little red berries on its pleasant, frugiferous acres than the rest of the world combined. To top this off Carver boasts first place among the cranberry towns, its 2,800 acres of bog harvesting 100,000 barrels a year--fifteen per cent of the whole world’s crop! No argument about our list of “firsts” so far, is there?
While we’re firsting: ages ago, when Carver was the first iron producing corner of the New World, the very first iron teakettle made in America is said to have been cast here--from Carver iron, Carver smelter, and moulded in Carver sand.
But, back to that corner of the town that’s Ellis Atwood’s own, private first--eighteen hundred acre Edaville.
Edaville, 210 acres of actual bog, is the biggest privately owned cranberry business in the world. Nearly 10,000 barrels of the sour little things grow here every year.
All this, with ultra-attractive buildings and equipment, is enough to set Mr. Atwood and his Thanksgiving sauce up as high as a block-signal. But wait: his Edaville Railroad!
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) One of the first Edaville freight trains, with railroad fan John Holt at the throttle of Monson engine No. 4. ]
The Edaville Railroad is maybe the most spectacular of all these interesting “firsts”. It’s even more so because it’s the last--but we’ll come to this _last_ part later. Let’s consider the _first_, first.
The first of all these famous Massachusetts cranberry lands to have a real, he-man, tobacco-chewing railroad, complete to the last fishplate, resplendent to the last parlor-car, and unbelievably efficient with its excellent big-railed track, stout little engines, and wonderland cars. Its importance as a plantation utility and, finally, the holiday fun it gives you thousands of visitors who’re making it a Sunday spa and a railroad fans’ Mecca.
That’s the Edaville Railroad, the Cranberry Belt: first of its kind, you see.
It’s the last one, too.
A cloud of nostalgia dims the brilliance of Edaville lights when we think of this side of the story. _Last of the two-foot gauges._ Final survivor of the colorful midgets that once puffed around our heterogeneous land.
Want to look it over? I thought so; Mr. Atwood is busy right now, and why wouldn’t he be with the biggest one-man cranberry plantation on earth, plus a little million civic and philanthropic affairs to see to? I’ll show you around. Come on!
Here we are--the screenhouse. Cranberry bogs have screenhouses the same as railroads have trains. These screenhouses, where berries are cleaned and graded and prepared for market, may be anything from a rough shed to this super structure here. This is the first one of its kind, too: a big, yet compact, brick show-place housing not only the berry equipment and the car shops, the company offices including Mr. Atwood’s own private sanctum (most admired spot in Edaville!), but brimming with storage space as well.
[Illustration:
(_Hosmer Photo_) Mr. Atwood’s model screenhouse, the finest in the world, built in 1940 at a cost of--well, that doesn’t matter. ]
The railroad really begins here. Maybe that’s because the first rails were laid into it for car repairing. There, clustering around like chicks with Mama Hen, is the railroad station and most of the yards.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) No dieselization on the Edaville. Here passenger extra No. 7 sails past work train on sandpit spur. ]
What a sight! Cranberry architecture and railroad artistry all mixed together under the green pine trees. See the vivid contrast--yellow sand and the bright blue sky. The red freight cars, and green passenger coaches sporting their goldleaf name of _Edaville_ along the sides.
Eh? Those other names? Oh; Mr. Atwood restored these cars to their original appearance and part of his pristine program was to letter several of them as they were in the beginning. The parlor-car is _Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes_, one ancient coach is _Bridgton & Saco River_, and that other one once rolled over the old _Wiscasset & Quebec_ rails. The idea makes a hit, too.
See--there are some trains scurrying about their cranberry work, while that string of shiny passenger cars at the station, headed by the impatient little homuncular engine, is waiting to take you for a ride.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) No. 7 hauls Mr. Atwood’s passenger train, loaded with a hundred of his guests. ]
We’ll walk over. (No; that dog won’t bite.) Some station, isn’t it? Just built this Spring. Thousands of people visit Edaville every week; I guess lots of them hurry right by Plymouth Rock to come over here. That’s why Mr. Atwood decided he needed a passenger station.
Yes, it’s quite a place; besides the usual station fixtures it has a real Fred Harveyish kind of restaurant, a museum, waiting-room, and social hall besides. That’s where they get together for club meetings, speeches when some speechster is here, yarn-swapping, and to look at all the interesting railroad relics and pictures on display there. There’ll be some barracks upstairs someday, where visitors may bed down for a night or two.
End of the line? No, not exactly. The tracks go right by the station. That’s because it’s on a little loop encircling Mr. Atwood’s model Edaville village--screenhouse, railroad, and all those cozy cottages where his employees live--and joins the main line again half a mile away. We’ll see the switch when we go out. Trains can go out of this station three different ways. You’ll see.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) Mr. and Mrs. Atwood smile beside of their de luxe coach “Elthea”, named in her honor. ]
No. 7’s hauling the excursion train today. Want to see her? A trim little pot, don’t you think? Baldwin built her thirty-four years ago and she was the biggest two-foot gauge engine ever built then. Thirty-five tons wrapped up there. Doesn’t look it, does she? Her outside frames enclose four thirty-five inch drivers that can really roll. Hundred and eighty pounds of steam, twelve-by-sixteen inch cylinders. You won’t see it today but she can bat ’em off at a sixty mile clip!
Like most of this equipment No. 7 came from the Bridgton & Saco River, up in Maine.
This tricky little car hooked to her tail was the B. & S. R.’s Railway Post Office, Express, and Baggage car. Yes, they used to have a regular mail contract, postal clerks and all. That was before the other war.
This coach, too, was a Bridgton car, the old _Pondicherry_. Laconia Car Works built her and a mate, the _Mount Pleasant_, when the road was new, sixty-four years ago. Of course, Mr. Atwood has refinished and renovated them all. When we go out on the train please notice those coaches down in the yard: the one with double windows and stained glass was a fine idea of two-foot de luxe coach accommodations. She’s the _Elthea_, named for Elthea Atwood, Mr. Atwood’s wife. A proper tribute, too, because she works right with him in everything--cranberry business, railroad, and all.
Now: this smooth little wagon on the rear here, _that’s_ the parlor car.
Ever hear of the old Sandy River parlor car? You must have! It’s been in print ever since Jackson & Sharpe built it, ’way back when. In 1901, to be exact.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) Old Coach “Mount Pleasant”, identical to the “Pondicherry”, both built in 1882 by Laconia Car Co. ]
Want to walk through it? We’ve got time. Here’s the smoking end: two leather seats and a couple of chairs. And in here is the lavatory in one corner and the car heater in the other--hot water. This spacious cubical to your left is the toilet; no shoe-horn needed there, eh? Plenty of room for the old bustles and hoop skirts to swish around.
[Illustration:
(_Atwood Photo_) Interior of parlor car “Rangeley”. ]
Now we’re in the parlor car proper: just see those swivel chairs with their lush, green upholstery; the deep, filigreed carpet covering the floor. Fit for the millionaires who used to ride in her, eh?
Each seat has a number, up over the window. Time was, years ago, when you coughed up an extra simoleon to ride in this buggy. A colored porter, who’d left New York the night before, stepped from his big Pullman into this baby-carriage to brush off your dandruff on the forty-seven mile run through Franklin County’s hills to Rangeley--a swanky resort in those days.
_Rangeley_ was the car’s name, too: _Rangeley No. 9_.
When the Sandy River was abandoned in 1935 the little _Rangeley_, none the worse for her generation of scooting through sunny valleys and boreal storms, was bought by a doctor in Strong, Maine for two hundred dollars. His big house was right beside the old main line and they left the parlor car in his own dooryard, sitting on four sticks of sixty-pound rail she’d rolled over so many times.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) With all the decorum of her wide gauge sisters the little “Rangeley” trails the passenger train along the twisting dikes. ]
He died. Then a connoisseur of antiquity who just couldn’t see her sold for a hen-house or a camp, bought her. Later on Mr. Atwood got her from him. Came down here on a big trailer one twenty-below-zero morning. Imagine a parlor car breezing along the highway!
Well, looks like we’re ready to go. Let’s stay here on the rear platform. Good place to view the sights.
Starts smoothly? Sure: could be the _Federal_ leaving Grand Central. These little trains ride all right. When track’s kept up you can’t tell ’em from standard gauge.
The enginehouse will be over there. Six stalls: four for the engines and two for some of the motor cars. Motor cars? Oh yes, there are motor cars. You’ll see some before we get back.
Look up there at the screenhouse: those big doors are the car shop tracks. Holds six or eight cars in there. These are the main yards we’re going through now; storage, mostly. See that track on the higher level over there? Goes to the screenhouse door where berries are unloaded in harvesting time. Screen and grade ’em in there. Stiff climb up that bank, too. Makes the little engines grunt.
This is quite a yard. Confusing, too, until you get it fixed in your mind. It’s like this: the track we’re on now is the original main line out of Edaville--down through these yards and out onto the bogs. Now, since the railroad was completed, it’s kind of an alternative cutoff, I’d say.
[Illustration:
(_Hosmer Photo_) In the shade of Mr. Atwood’s beautiful pine grove the baby cars enjoy a Cape Cod siesta. ]
When Mr. Atwood surveyed the station loop (oh, he does all his own surveying!) he branched it off this line about half a mile down from here. That’s the switch I told you we’d see when we went out. A train coming in off the bogs can go around the loop into the station, then keep on going just as we’re going now, over this track, and back onto the bogs again.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) A midget freight train puffs up the heavy grade back of Edaville village. ]
Running to the upper end of the Atwood property the line swings east; to our right, it’ll be. Circles down the shore of big Number Two reservoir and, instead of re-entering the main stem again it comes into these yards from a totally different direction--on that track to your left, across the canal. A train coming in that way would head into the station just the opposite to our direction. But she could proceed around the little loop and come into the switch below us here and head onto the bogs the same way we’re going.
Another way: if we’d left the station just now and thrown a switch at the other end of this yard, we’d have branched across the canal onto that track over there, and proceeded around the line just the other way from our present direction. Confusing, yes; but you’ll get it straightened out when we’ve been around. Western slants or eastern perspectives, it’s still the last two-foot gauge we’re riding on!
We’re in the grove now. Pretty, isn’t it? Before the big wind of three or four years ago this was a forest of beautiful pines. That gale played havoc here as well as down on the coast; blew down over half of Mr. Atwood’s pet pine trees. He felt pretty sorry at the time but now agrees that maybe railroad yards are more pleasing than the whispering conifers were!
How do you like the sound of No. 7’s whistle? Euphonious as any wide-gauge tooter, eh? He’s blowing for Barboza’s Crossing. We’re leaving the yards. See that cottage there--Mr. Barboza used to have a big, ugly rooster; that hellion would attack trains and humans alike. My shins used to be all gory where he’d clumb me and I strongly suspect that under his bristling feathers there were black-and-blue spots, too! No; the train didn’t mash him. We hoped it would, but he was too smart. Barboza had to chop his head off three times before the tartar went down for the count.
There: here’s your first cranberry bog, Number Six. Pretty, too; especially when it’s in bloom. Looks like some strange kind of landscape gardening. This embankment under us is all “turf work”. Ever hear of “turfing”? Neither had I, until I came down here. It’s all right, too: instead of expensive retaining walls or rip-rap they just cut a lot of square sods and lay them in a just-so way; and there’s a strong, dependable vertical wall. Looks neat, I think.
Right ahead now is the switch where the loop swings off to the station. Right here--see! Pretty piece of track, isn’t it? Winding up through those woods with sunlight and shadows playing across the rails. Over here--see all those timbers? They’re old ties the New Haven took out of their Cape lines. All creosoted and mostly hard wood. The New Haven and the Boston & Maine have been pretty good about helping the Edaville, and Mr. Atwood bought those ties for less money than the Maine cedar’s cost. He saws ’em in two and gets a couple of four foot, three inch ties from each one. Makes wonderful track for these mites to run on.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) A track crew, under the supervision of Foreman Hatch (third from left), keeps the section clean. ]
We’re skirting the little Number One reservoir now. Cranberry bogs must have plenty of water. Mr. Atwood has a system of ditches and canals, controlled by floodgate-thingamajigs, that supply quick water to any or all his bogs. This flooding may be for pest control or, in the late fall, to cover berries as a frost protection. Remember how we often hear radio reports in late September or October, telling what temperatures can be expected on the cranberry bogs tonight? Run some water in ’em and old Jack Frost is frustrated! More gates drain it off quickly when the danger’s past.
This country is flat. All the water must be pumped into these reservoirs from some pond or river. His pumping-station is up beyond the Ball Park; two or three big electric pumps. I forget how many million gallons these reservoirs hold. Enough to get you all wet, anyway.
Pretty along here; brown sand and blue water and green woods. We think the narrow gauge railroad adds a lot to the charm, too. We’re blowing for Plantation Center now. Will stop there probably. Want to get off a minute?
The Atwoods are strong for landscaping; keep all their grounds so neat and attractive.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) Big Lorain-40 shovel ready to load sand. ]