Part 4
She was the second one of the Maine two-footers to go.
In 1935 the Sandy River, with its excellent line, trim engines and cars, and business possibilities dunked its fire and went home. That left two: the Bridgton line and the little Monson.
Wish I had time to tell you about the Bridgton’s last sickness. What a time they had! The town owned it, you know. Most of the folks wanted to junk it while a few enterprising souls hung on. In cahoots with some railroad fans its president, Lester Ames, put up a lively scrap to save the little line. Lasted a couple of years, that wrangling. First, the railroad champions would be on top, and then their dark-complexioned adversaries were eye-gouging or had a knee in the railroad’s bowels. It looked bad. Hard telling how long it might have lasted but the _coup de grace_ came suddenly when someone slipped through a deal with an uninnocent junkman. Spikes flew. So did Mr. Atwood.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) The moribund Bridgton line in 1941, when fan excursions and passionate junkmen were running wild. Here No. 8 is ready to haul a crowd of railroad-fans down the line. ]
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) An Edaville work train climbs Mt. Urann past the probable site of the Ball Field station. See Mr. Atwood’s snowplow hibernating at the far end of the siding. ]
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) The Edaville Railroad will never be completed. New spurs and siding beckon from isolated bogs. Here a crew is ballasting a new spur to 31 Bog. ]
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) Engineer Knight and Fireman Young bat a freight train across the bog, and will shortly return loaded with red, sour bog-nuggets (cranberries, to you). ]
He’d been keeping tabs on it anyway and when this junk-shark (_he_ came from Massachusetts, too!) began wrecking things Mr. Atwood A-carded up there, plum full of adrenaline, and managed to buy quite a lot of equipment. No. 7 engine, some cars, and the turntable. Paid through the nose for it, too. Worse still, after paying the money and assuming ownership, this junk-expert would turn around and cut it up for scrap, claiming he didn’t know that Mr. Atwood wanted it! Biggest wonder in the world he didn’t put the torch to No. 7 engine.
This was all in 1941. That fall the track was gone and the cars stored at Bridgton Junction. The connoisseur who’d previously bought the parlor car, Eric Sexton of Rockport, Maine, also bought some of these B. & S. R. cars for the same reason--to preserve ’em for posterity. Another fan, Edgar Mead, bought two or three. John Holt and Van Walsh, who’d fallen in love with No. 8 engine, bought her. That greasy junkman sure cleaned up on those fellers. In the end, however, Mr. Atwood owned it all and got a corner on two-foot gauge railroads!
Year ago last fall he arranged with the Somerville movers, C. E. Hall & Sons, to bring the things down here. He’d talked with the railroad people but there were car shortages then, and besides the Maine Central had dismantled their siding there at the Junction. He’d have had to done the loading, to I. C. C. specifications, whereas the Hall crews did it if he shipped by truck. So, the last of the two-foot gauges came home to Massachusetts--by truck!
Quite a sight seeing a railroad whizzing down the Boston road.
Newspapers and magazines played it up plenty. Still do, in fact. Mr. Atwood’s name is in the news more than any railroad man since Peter Cooper or Jim Hill. The idea of his little Edaville Railroad seems to click.
[Illustration:
(_Atwood Photo_) Not all Edaville business is out on the bog. Here Mr. and Mrs. Atwood confer in the seclusion of their private office in the palatial screenhouse. ]
That’s about the story. The Edaville’s quite a railroad in its own right, let alone because it’s the last of the two-foot gauges. It isn’t completed yet, either. Doubt if it ever will be: there’ll always be a new spur to build or a bog-siding somewhere to install. Maybe some new equipment, too--such as a nice, new Plymouth diesel for the cranberry freights.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) No. 4 heads a freight train into clear to allow the passenger job to gallop by. ]
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) No. 7 crosses some undeveloped bog. Maybe next year cranberry vines will bloom over there in the brush. ]
Eh? Sure: why not? What’s wrong with diesels? You fellers always get emotional when someone says diesel. Want to see the Edaville go in the red? This railroad (although you’d never guess it) isn’t a plaything; it’s a plantation utility, designed to facilitate Mr. Atwood’s cranberry business. The passenger train and the parlor car, and Sunset Vista, are gestures he and Mrs. Atwood make from their own pockets to give people some fun down here--and to have a little themselves. But he can’t run his freight trains at a loss just to see coal smoke smudging all over those nice red cranberries. Red’s a pretty color, but not on the ledger!
Probably if the other two-footers had bought some Plymouth diesels they’d all be running today. Lots of difference between coal at ten bucks a ton and oil at ten cents a gallon. Personally I’m for it--a ten ton, eight-wheel diesel Plymouth. Besides, that’ll save the steam engines for Sunday and holiday passenger trains!
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) No. 7 when she was a girl at home. Here she waits at Bridgton Junction for men to load mail and express into the baggage-car; then she’ll breeze up the hills to Bridgton, 16 miles, in an even 40 minutes! ]
Gosh! Here it is Six-thirty; they’re backing the _Sunset Special_ in. Maybe Mr. Atwood would like to show you those pictures of old two-footers in the few minutes that are left. I see he’s finished his steamed clams now.
Guess I’ll mosey onto the platform and see who’s in the crowd. Always hoped Kilroy might be here sometime!
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) The first 2-foot gauge enginette in America, Bedford & Billerica “Ariel” No. 1. You see her here as Sandy River No. 1 less a monstrous smokestack and goldleaf filigree. ]
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Appendix
You’d think I’d written a five-foot shelf of books instead of a small travel-guide pamphlet, if Forewords, Introductions, and Appendixes are any criteria. This is how it seems to stew out though, so it’s how you’ll have to take it. Keep cool!
Lots of you won’t be interested in this Appendix. It’s designed for the fellers who’re more or less railroad minded and thirst for technical details. It’s a brief critique about the gears and rods that made the wheels go round, during those hectic, vortical years. A cursory account of engines and cars and mileage that made up the Edaville’s immediate predecessors.
Here again we’ll have to condense the facts in favor of space. To include a really comprehensive _expose_ of these historical lines--locomotive rosters and dimensions, car measurements and classifications, capitalizations, earnings and expenses, and blow-by-blow reports of the septuagenary rise and fall, as well as scale-drawings for model fans--would be a book in itself, and a family-Bible size at that. No one but the most serious students of railroad lore would read beyond the title page. Let’s try to jam a lot into a few pages here.
EDAVILLE RAILROAD
Just when the Edaville was conceived is a risky guess. Maybe in 1941 when the moribund B. & S. R. prodded Mr. Atwood’s imagination. Maybe forty years ago when, as a lanky young feller, he mused on the pleasure of owning something better than rickety sections of portable track and tiny one-yard dumpcars.
He did something about it in 1941, anyway. They were busting up the Bridgton road. He bought the biggest part of it. Wars came. You couldn’t call your soul your own unless it was kept out of sight. Without an AA-12-PDQ-RSVP-1/2 priority there was no such thing as moving things by freight, and these coveted ratings weren’t being handed out to move narrow gauge railroads from Maine to South Carver. Unless they moved into the Community Scrap Drive, and I never understood how this one escaped those zealous patriots.
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) Important in pygmy power development were the little Moguls. The Sandy River had engines with separate tenders as well as those like Mr. Atwood’s--built all in one piece. ]
It did have a tight squeak. Mr. Atwood was notified that his railroad equipment might be seized anytime for Government use and for him to leave it strictly alone. Engines and cars needed for self-defense--don’t touch!
Funny how it came out: A few weeks later he was advised he might protect his ownership by moving everything to Carver at once. Mr. Atwood tartly replied that such extravagant use of transportation facilities and scarce gasoline, when our country was fighting for its life, wasn’t becoming a patriotic gentleman. Mightn’t he wait until the wars were done? An answer sizzled back! Henceforth he might not only do as he pleased, but the government had oodles of railroad equipment they’d like _to sell him_, war or no war. Would he buy?
He wouldn’t; then.
The wars petered out. We were allowed to use the gasoline again. Big trucks and little ones headed north in the fall of 1945, and rumbled back with loads of little cars. The City of New Bedford owned a private railroad that once hauled coal to their Water Works pumping station, and they agreed to sell. Two and a half miles of fifty-six pound steel. Three miles more came down from the mountain grades of Parker-Young Company’s logging road in New Hampshire. Ties from Maine and more from the New Haven. Crews assembled.
Some desultory track-laying began in 1946 but it wasn’t until late that fall that a former New Haven track man lined up his gang, and work began in earnest. In the car shops repairs were progressing, for the day when trains would begin to run.
Mr. Atwood did the engineering. He scooches to a transit as easily as Farmer Jones milks a cow. He personally supervised everything else, too; nothing was too small to escape his attention, no detail too mean for his august decision. Mostly his own crews did the work. When cranberry work could spare them they turned-to and became railroad men. Except for the track boss no former railroad men were hired, although Badger might as well have been an ex-Master Car Builder: he knew enough to be.
The locomotive crews are Mr. Atwood’s own cranberry men, instructed in their exotic duties and performing them with remarkable efficiency.
Friends, visitors, and well-wishers have joined in offering suggestions and criticisms to help the enterprise along. Mostly, though, it’s been a series of inspirations plus years of secret planning from Mr. Atwood himself.
Today the physical properties of his railroad are:
Miles of road:
Main line 5.5 miles Grove Cutoff 0.6 miles Yards 1.0 mile Total 7.1 miles
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) This was biggest of them all, Sandy River No. 23. My pet grief is that Mr. Atwood didn’t go into the railroad business ten years sooner, and catch some of these tricky little pigs when the S. R. & R. L. went broke in 1935. ]
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) Gasoline rail-buses on the Sandy River. The further one, with the trailer attached, is now on the Edaville. ]
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) The freight train waits while pickers scoop another box of berries. I’ll bet their backs’ll ache before night! ]
Engines:
No. 12 1-ton Bog Engine, Model T Ford 13 1-ton Bog Engine, Model A Ford 14 5-ton Plymouth 3 0-4-4T Vulcan ex-Monson R. R. No. 3 4 0-4-4T Vulcan ex-Monson R. R. No. 4 7 2-4-4T Baldwin, ex-B. & S. R. 7 8 2-4-4T Baldwin, ex-B. & S. R. 8
Cars, Passenger:
No. G1 Model T Trackauto ex-S. R. & R. L. G2 Model T Trackauto ex-S. R. & R. L. G4 Reo Railbus Baggage No. 31 ex-B. & S. R. 31 Coach 15 ex-B. & S. R. _Pondicherry_ 17 ex-B. & S. R. 17 (now named _Elthea_) 18 ex-B. & S. R. _Mount Pleasant_ 3 W. W. & F. 3 Parlor 9 S. R. & R. L. _Rangeley_
Freight:
Box: 15 cars Flat: 14 cars Excursion: 4 cars Tank: 2 cars Caboose 557 ex-S. R. & R. L. 557 101 B. & S. R. 101 Snowplow 2 B. & S. R. 2 Flanger 1 B. & S. R. 4-wheel dump: 32 cars Total number of cars, 80
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) The berries go aboard. Boxcar 13 already has a load, and presently the little train will meander down to Edaville screenhouse and the graders will take over. ]
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) Here is little engine No. 3 before she came to the Atwood family. Lots of snow in Monson, eh? ]
[Illustration:
(_Moody Photo_) Transferring sand from a “wide gauge” car to the narrow gauge, at Monson Junction years ago. See the link-and-pin coupling on the Monson flat. ]
BRIDGTON & SACO RIVER R. R.
Chartered in 1881, built in 1882, opened in 1883. Extended to Harrison 1898. Maine Central purchased it 1912, sold it 1927. Reorganized it as Bridgton & Harrison Ry. and new company assumed control in 1930. Harrison line abandoned 1930. Entire line abandoned 1941. Cost to build and equip approximately $200,000. Peak year of earnings 1921 when revenue was $112,000.
[Illustration:
First train order issued on the Edaville; members of the National Railway Historical Society made this trip, August 31, 1937. ]
[Illustration: Edaville Sign]
Miles of road:
Hiram to Bridgton, 16 miles Bridgton to Harrison 5 miles
Engines:
No. 1 0-4-4T Hinckley 1882 2 0-4-4T Hinckley 1882 Became W. W. & F. No. 5 3 0-4-4T Portland 1892 Became K. C. 3: W. W. & F. 8 4 0-4-4T Porter 1901 5 2-4-4T Portland 1906 6 2-4-4T Baldwin 1907 7 2-4-4T Baldwin 1913 Became Edaville 7 8 2-4-4T Baldwin 1924 Became Edaville 8
Cars:
2 Baggage, 1 Combination, 4 Coaches 1 Caboose, 69 Box and Flat, 2 Tank, 1 Plow, 1 Flanger
BILLERICA & BEDFORD R. R.
Chartered in 1876; built 1877. Abandoned Jan. 1878. Sold in entirety to Sandy River R. R.
Miles, 8.6.
2 Locomotives,
_Ariel_ 0-4-4T Hinckley 1877, became S. R. No. 1 _Puck_ 0-4-4T Hinckley 1877, became S. R. No. 2
Coaches, 1; Excursion, 2; Combination, 1; Box, 1; Flat, 6.
SANDY RIVER & RANGELEY LAKES R. R.
Sandy River R. R. chartered 1879, built 1879. 18 miles.
Franklin & Megantic R. R. chartered 1884, built 1884. 15 miles.
Kingfield & Dead River, chartered 1893, built 1894. 16 miles.
Phillips & Rangeley R. R., chartered 1889, built 1890-91. 29 miles.
Madrid R. R. chartered 1903, built 1903. 11 miles.
Eustis R. R. chartered 1903, built 1903. 19 miles.
The 1908 Consolidation of these roads formed the S. R. & R. L. system, and including logging branches it gave the new company approximately one hundred and twenty miles of line, of which the forty-seven mile Farmington-Rangeley road, the thirty mile Strong-Bigelow line, and the ten mile Eustis Branch had scheduled passenger trains.
The S. R. & R. L.--or just plain _Sandy River_ as it always stayed in the hearts of Franklin County--deserves a book in itself. Its history and pictorial display would fill a big one. But here are the scantiest of facts: With the Consolidation this new company inherited a galaxy of equipment; whether or not all these units were renumbered into the new S. R. & R. L. roster, or if some older ones were scrapped, is (and ever will be, probably) a moot subject among railroad fans. I’ve spent hours--yes, months, trying to track it down and willingly admit that I’m bewildered and as uncertain as before. I admit, too, for the benefit of serious fans who believe they’ve identified these old engines and cars, that some logical and chronological sequences look pretty convincing; and that’s all. There’s no proof, no positive evidence. I’m not extending my neck. Here’s an all-time roster of motive power as complete as I can find indisputable records to substantiate it.
Locomotives:
Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4 are open to question. Probably F. & M. 1 and 2; S. R. 1; and P. & R. 4 _Bo-peep_ were the culprits; but which were which no one knows.
No. 5 0-4-4T Portland Co. 1890? ex-S. R. 4 6 0-4-4T Portland Co. 1891 ex-S. R. 5 7 0-4-4T Portland Co. 1891 ex-P. & R. 1 8 2-4-4T Baldwin 1907 ex-S. R. 16 9 2-4-4T Baldwin 1909 10 2-4-4T Baldwin 1916 15 2-6-2 Baldwin 1891 ex-P. & R. 3 16 2-6-2 Baldwin 1892 ex-S. R. 2nd 3 17 0-4-4T Baldwin 1893 ex-P. & R. 2 18 2-6-2 Baldwin 1893 ex-S. R. 2nd 2 19 2-6-2 Baldwin 1904 ex-S. R. 8 20 0-4-4T Baldwin 1903 ex-Eustis 7 21 0-4-4T Baldwin 1904 ex-Eustis 8 22 0-4-4T Baldwin 1904 ex-Eustis 9 23 2-6-2 Baldwin 1913 24 2-6-2 Baldwin 1919
Sandy River 1st 3 was an O-4-4T Porter, sold to the W. & Q. in 1894. No. 6 was sold to the Kennebec Central about 1922 as their No. 4, and was acquired by the W. W. & F. in 1933.
Cars: Another blank wall. The company’s _schedule of property_, typed in 1935 for prospective scrap buyers, says they had 73 boxcars, 58 flats, and 136 “other freight train cars”. My own observations around there would place the number of boxcars at nearly twice 73. Several official reports had given the total number of freight cars as 350 whereas this _schedule_ amounts to only 267. Just another of those vicissitudes the historian must bang his head against!
As for those “other freight train cars” they were probably the swarms of flats fitted with rack sides, for hauling pulpwood. Some may have been the truant boxcars. Ho-hum.
As for passenger cars, this august _schedule_ says “12 coaches, 3 combination, and 2 baggage”. The 3 combinations and 2 baggage comes out all right, but I’m nostalgicly moved to wonder where they hid all those twelve coaches all the years I used to be over there. I was familiar with five. To be sure, there were a couple of old, abandoned coaches and one retired combination boarded up, and used as camps. But still, no twelve.
The _schedule_ lists six cabooses and four gasoline railcars. I’ve seen eight cabooses, and ridden in five railcars. There were five snowplows in service, and seven flangers. There were big turntables at Farmington, Strong, Phillips, Madrid Station, Rangeley, and Kingfield. Three-stall wooden enginehouses at Rangeley and at Kingfield, and another at Bigelow before that Carrabasset-Bigelow section was abandoned about twenty years ago. The big ten-stall brick house at Phillips is still there, used for a woodworking mill.
MONSON RAILROAD
Chartered in 1882; built in 1883. 6 miles. Abandoned 1945.
Engines:
Nos. 1 and 2, O-4-4T Hinckley 1882 3 O-4-4T Vulcan 1912 now Edaville 3 4 O-4-4T Vulcan 1918 now Edaville 4
Cars: 1 Combination; 28 flat and boxcars. 1 snowplow, 1 spreader.
KENNEBEC CENTRAL R. R.
Chartered 1889; built 1890. 5 miles. Had no physical connection with any other railroad, as its western terminus, Randolph, is separated from the Maine Central’s “Lower Road” at Gardiner by the Kennebec River. Barges unloaded Togus coal at the railroad coal docks, on the Randolph side. The K. C. was also unique in having no ballast supply on their line. All gravel was carted in to them, the same as coal would be.
Engines:
No. 1 0-4-4T Baldwin 1890 _Volunteer_ 2 0-4-4T Portland 1891 3 0-4-4T Portland 1892 ex-B. & S. R. 3 4 0-4-4T Portland 1891 ex-S. R. & R. L. 6
Coaches, 2; Combinations, 2. Box, flat, and dropside gondolas, 13. Also a freakish kind of snowplow-flanger rig.
So, we’ll call this an introduction to a two-foot gauge history. Maybe our more accomplished brethren will call it less complimentary names. If the printer will correct the misspelled words, and I have any luck at South Carver next week taking pictures, maybe _Edaville Railroad_ won’t be so bad, after all.
(I guess this is all.)