Edaville Railroad

(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.)

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!

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.

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, 3and 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.

4The 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.

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!

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.

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 7survivor 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.

The railroad really begins here. Maybe that’s because the first rails were laid into it for car repairing. There, clustering around 8like chicks with Mama Hen, is the railroad station and most of the yards.

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.

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 10a mile away. We’ll see the switch when we go out. Trains can go out of this station three different ways. You’ll see.

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.

11This 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.

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.

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 12lavatory 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.

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.

When the Sandy River was abandoned in 1935 the little Rangeley, none the worse for her generation of scooting through sunny valleys 13and 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.

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 14and 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.

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. 15A 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.

16Running 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. 17Right 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.

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? 18Run 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.

There: this is the western side of the big, eighteen hundred acre loop; track runs a couple of miles along the west bounds of Mr. Atwood’s property and past several of the sand-piles and bogs. Bogs 19must be sprinkled with an inch of sand every winter to keep their bed in proper trim and to combat weeds and bugs. Sand also radiates heat to prevent the vines from freezing in our cold New England winters. While vines may freeze into the ice without harming ’em they mustn’t be chilled by the cold wind, if you can figure that one out. Mr. Atwood spreads nearly ten thousand yards of sand each year. He’s got a lot of grit, wouldn’t you say?

This big bog—that’s Fourteen Acre; a record breaker. Shells out nearly eighty barrels to the acre!

Where did that pile of sand come from? A mile up the line is his sand-pit. A power shovel loads it onto flatcars and the train hauls it to these different sand piles; there’s seven or eight thousand yards in that pile there. When sanding time comes—but you aren’t interested in all this; you want to see this pocket-edition railroad.

Look 'way across the big reservoir there: that’s the railroad coming down the east side. Remember I showed you where it entered 20the yards just below the station? The smudge of smoke is a work train. We’ll meet ’em either at the Ball Park or the sand pit.

Ball Park? Yes; or more correctly, the Atwood Athletic Field. He built a baseball ground, picnic spot, and a few buildings there. Plenty active all summer, too. We’ll be up there shortly now.

Incidentally, it’s when we leave the Ball Park that the track swings east and south again to go down the opposite side of this reservoir, where the work train is now. It passes Sunset Vista, winds along the lower end of the reservoir, and finally enters Edaville yard where I pointed it out to you.

Isn’t Fourteen Acre a neat looking bog? Not all growers keep their bogs as neat and trim as Mr. Atwood does. Sure, it costs. There’s something satisfying in owning the finest cranberry plantation in the world. When the railroad’s completed and there’s some 21time to spare he intends to erect signs around the bogs and at different points of interest, explaining about cranberry culture, history, production, and how bogs are built and cared for. Like a self-conducted tour your ride’ll be then.

We’re crossing a corner of undeveloped swamp now: just plain mud and bushes. Potential bog land, though. Clear that jungle off, dig out some of the mud and dump in clean sand, set out the cranberry vines—as you’d plant strawberries or rosebushes—and presto! A new bog.

New bogs cost close to three thousand dollars an acre. You must wait four years before the berries come, too. In the end, though, it pays off: a well built, properly kept bog, like these around here, should be good for pretty nearly five hundred dollars an acre every year. Yes, there’s gold in them swamps, but you and me needn’t conjure up dreams of owning any. It’s a complicated and expensive 22proposition. Takes years to learn. More men have gone broke in the swamps than ever got rich out of ’em.

Yes, this parlor car sure is cute. Mr. Atwood’s pet, too. (Look out! don’t fall over that woman’s feet; she’s spread out there like a pumpkin-vine.) He had painters and repairmen working half the winter restoring this car to her school girl complexion. Most of her’s solid mahogany. She would cost a queen’s dowry to build now: all those inlaid woods, the filigree designs on her ceiling, the brass lamps, expensive upholstery, plate glass windows—the splendor of the legendary Nineties. Can’t buy those things for a song now. Notice how contagious it is—that traditional humor of those old days. Seems to have infected our carload of passengers today—even the old girl with her feet clear across the aisle!

Careful now: watch your step when we cross from the Rangeley over to this coach ahead, the Pondicherry. These little puppies can nip off your leg as quickly as the wide gaugers can.

Quite a car, the Pondicherry, isn’t she? That was the name she had when she was new in 1883, up on the Bridgton & Saco River. Pondicherry was the original name of the town up there; changed it to Bridgton later. I don’t know what it means but somehow I seem to think of it along with County Down, Galway, or Connemara. Could be Swedish or an Indian name, though.

Thirty people can sit in these little one-butt seats. Notice the carved wood and old fashioned windows. Mr. Atwood’s renovating job was about perfect, wasn’t it? She was some little hack in 1883; still is, too. Look into that nut-shell toilet—that’s where you need the shoe-horn!

These cars don’t sway much, do they? Steady and serene as a Shore Line job. Edaville track is just as good, too, comparatively speaking. This big rail—mostly fifty-six pounds to the yard—is heavier in proportion than the New Haven’s big hundred and thirty pound steel.

How fast are we going? Oh, about twenty-five, I guess. Sometimes when he’s feeling extra kipper the engineer inches her out a 23bit and No. 7’s two-bit drivers will really roll. Mr. Atwood doesn’t approve of that, with a train load of his guests aboard.

Cute little rig, isn’t she? See the mail-racks; and the slots in the doors where you could mail a letter once upon a time. Some of these philatelist fellers think it would be a super idea for Mr. Atwood to arrange with the Postal Department for a one-day Railway Post Office on the Edaville; mail clerks cancelling letters Edaville & Cranberry Bogs R.P.O. or something like that. Gosh! We’d pay off the national debt with stamps that day. You know how wild stamp collectors get about such things?

Up here from the head platform, or blind end, as it used to be called, you can get a closeup of No. 7 batting off the rail-joints. See how she—Oh! here we are at the sand pit. He’s stopping. Let’s drop off and see where all that sand comes from.

Wonder why everyone else is jumping off? I see: that work train’s got in; they’re loading sand to grade the Sunset Vista picnic ground, a flag stop down the east side. Their engine, little No. 3, came from another of those Maine roads, the Monson. They had two just alike, No. 3 and No. 4. Mr. Atwood bought them from a concern in Rochester, New York, where they’d been taken when the Monson road was scrapped in 1945. Yes, she’s lots smaller than No. 7. Weighs only eighteen tons. She has inside frames, like wide gauge engines do. No. 7 and No. 8’s frames are outside the wheels, you know.

The Monson engines were built by the Vulcan Iron Works down in Wilkes Barre, one in 1912 and the other in 1918. Their cylinders are much smaller, too; only ten by fourteen inches. Carry a hundred and sixty pounds of steam. The inside frames, which make a narrower support for their balance, makes ’em ride different from the big engines. Slop around more. They’ll scare you, too, until you get used to them. Actually these inside framers are as safe as 25the others; it’s just that their equilibrium is kind of emotional. Nearly all the early two-foot locomotives had inside frames and they’re the ones that hung up most of the slim gauge speed records.

See: the big Lorain shovel over there is loading sand onto the flatcars; ten cubic yards to a car, about fifteen tons. There’s usually a work train out, doing routine plantation work along with construction and maintenance duties. That’s what she’s doing: building the station grounds at Sunset Vista.

Wish you could have seen those flatcars when they first landed here. Ready to fall apart. Sills rotten, flooring gone, and not a brake working. Mr. Atwood hired Roland Badger, a millwright up to Walter Baker’s; Badger is quite a railroad fan himself, has built lots of little scale models for 0-gauge outfits. He was planning on buying a pasture somewhere and making himself some quarter-scale iron colts to run in it. However, the Edaville fits into his dreams pretty well. He’s repaired or rebuilt about every car here: new sills and floors, and got the brakes to working.

They’re going out ahead of us! See how easily little No. 3 snakes her train out of the pit. That tricky little caboose they’re hauling came from the Sandy River, like the parlor car. When the Maine Central owned the Sandy River, thirty years ago, they built a number of those cabooses in their Waterville shops. About as perfect a molecular reproduction of a wide gauge buggy as anything could be, eh? I like that cupola. It’s quite a treat to ride up there surveying Mr. Atwood’s eighteen hundred acres from such a vantage point. We’ll see the work train again at Sunset Vista. Let’s go on to the Ball Park now.

Are you especially interested in railroads? This may not mean much to you, but if a standard gauge car was built to these same proportions it would be nearly twenty feet wide and twenty-two feet high! Actually they’re only ten feet wide and around twelve or thirteen feet high. Shows you how large, in proportion, these two-footers are. An overhang on either side that’s greater than the gauge of track! 27Still, they don’t feel like you’re riding a tight rope, do they? Personally, I think what this country needs is more two-foot gauges!

28The Ball Park! We’re two and a half miles from the screenhouse now. Pretty well to the farther end of Mr. Atwood’s cranberry empire.

They’re having a ball game up here today; South Carver Sunday School playing the West Wareham Firemen—seems to be an appropriate analogy there, don’t you think? Sunday Schools usually do oppose people who’re heading for the Fire! Two hundred people watching that game; came up on a special train right after dinner. Those people 'way over at the edge of the woods, they’re Plymouth Kiwanians having their annual clambake. They’re great for clam bakes down here; say it makes ’em tough.

Oh: you wanted to see one of the motor cars. Here’re two of them. This Model T touring car I like best; Sandy River built her in their Phillips shop. Master Mechanic Lee Stinchfield designed them all. He ought to be with Electro-Motive; he’d design diesel locomotives better’n they have now! They’re the neatest little rail cars I’ve ever seen. Mr. Atwood has two of these T Models; this touring, and a canopy body truck. They have a wholly different rear-end arrangement: kind of a “take-off” idea; put a little lever in forward gear and they’ll scoot away in high. Put it in back position and you fly backwards in high! This touring car was Superintendent Vose’s private car; he thought nothing of dropping down from Redington in twenty minutes; sixteen crooked, hilly miles. In winter he’s often pushed snow ahead of her radiator. They saved the Sandy River lots of money when otherwise a steam train would have gone out with fire-fighters or a repair crew. They save Mr. Atwood a lot. Quicker and cheaper than a pickup for cranberry men to run around in.

This other one here, the G4, is quite a wagon: something like the big gas-electrics on wide gauge roads. She seats fifteen people and used to haul a four-wheel trailer for mail and express. In summertime the Sandy River ran two of these rail-buses in place of steam passenger trains. Mr. Atwood occasionally uses this one to carry some visitors over the road but it’s mostly a sort of de luxe work car for his own crews.

Well, there goes No. 7’s bell: must be we’re leaving again. Want to ride the engine down to Sunset Vista? Mr. Atwood won’t like this 29if he sees us as it’s strictly against the rules; insurance company, or something. All settled? Keep off that steam pipe or you’ll be settled in Doc Nye’s office down to Wareham.

Here we go. You can see lots of bog from here. Nearly half the whole plantation’s in sight. There’s the big reservoir, Number Two, three hundred acres. Holds millions of gallons. Water is all pumped in from the river over back of the Ball Park. Fish come in through the pump, too, believe it or not!

These are new bogs he’s building; started ’em last year. Aren’t the pitch-pines pretty along the shore there? This ride down the east side is better scenery than we got coming up. Nights this whole shoreline is twinkling with little bug-lights where people are fishing for bass; come from miles around.

Sunset Vista’s about a mile down here. They called it Ridge Hill before the railroad came. Mr. and Mrs. Atwood used to come out 30here and sit in their Packard to watch the sunset. They enjoyed it. Said it was so restful and quiet. Must have been kind of a sacrifice, too, when they gave it up so others could enjoy it. Certainly is nothing restful nor quiet around here now, since everyone and their inlaws took it over for sunset picnics. Trains drop ’em off late in the afternoon and pick them up again along in the evening. There’s even talk of band concerts. It’s here that the Atwoods will probably have their big Christmas pageant this year—but maybe I’m letting the tabby out of the bag. Well, we’re almost there. He’ll stop, because that work train is out ahead of us.

You said awhile ago that you wanted to take some pictures. Movie camera? Good! Here’s what we can do: one of Mr. Atwood’s pickup trucks is here at Sunset Vista. We can take it and run ahead of the train to Edaville, about a mile. Want to? The railroad and Mr. Atwood’s auto road are side by side along the foot of the reservoir. 31All right: you climb in back of the pickup and get your Hell & Bowell flicker-box ready for action. I’ll keep just far enough ahead so you can shoot the whole train. Ready?

Hang on! This tipcart doesn’t ride like Rangeley No. 9. She should make a dandy picture back there—smoke rolling up over the pitch-pines and the three varnished cars glittering in the sun. See ’em swing through that reverse curve!

See this big iron along here? Seventy-five pound steel, biggest ever laid in two-foot track. Proportionately it’s equivalent to about two-hundred pound rail in wide gauge track: heavier than anything made yet.

Getting some good shots? I hope the reflections in the water show up clear; reservoir’s like a mirror.

Take a quick peek over 'cross there: that’s Plantation Center station, on the line we just went up over. Remember? The two lines 32are hardly a hundred yards apart right here. Sometime Mr. Atwood may lay a connecting track across this dike. Only a stone’s throw. Notice this big fill here: all new grade across the corner of the swamp. Kind of sags in the middle; will be filled and raised sometime. See No. 7 puffing up out of there!

Look: we’re beside the canal now. There’s the grove and yard ahead. We’re coming in on that line I told you about—from across the canal.

There’s the work train’s smoke. She came in ahead of us and it looks to me like No. 4 engine is out there too. Where could she have been when we left town?

Take it easy: I’m trying to stop this jalopy. We’re back in the yards again. Quite an array of power, eh? No. 7; the work train; No. 4 engine; the railbus which beat us down from the Ball Park; and there’s even little Plymouth No. 14 with a string of bog dumpcars. You couldn’t get so much action short of North Station.

All set? Then take a look at this Plymouth: all right, isn’t she? Mr. Atwood bought her up to Quincy a year or so ago. Alec MacLellan, a railroad fan, told him about her. You should have seen her then: about the sorriest little mill you could imagine. No cab, no bell, no nothing. Mr. Atwood’s crew took over and, patterning their dream-engine after those big he-Plymouths, they built her into this trim little cock-sparrow!

For real economy she puffs black all over the ledger. Will haul two or three cars like nobody’s business; will do shifting and light work as well as a steam engine. One man can run her without continually getting down to tend his fire. Has her limit, of course; but she weighs only four tons.

There: the work train’s going out; the passenger is hauling up to the depot to swap passengers for her next trip; I think that No. 4 is going out around the Edaville loop into the station that way. Why don’t we ride in on her?

Well, people just have to learn that an engine full of water will spew that black slush all over you. Gosh! What a mess. Married?

Sit up there on the fireman’s shelf. There; how does this engine ride? A little more jerky than No. 7 but still no worse than lots of wide gauge pots I’ve been on. She’s got steam brakes. No. 7’s and 8’s are vacuum. Those two-footers used all kinds of things for brakes, from modern air to such childish devices as brakemen dragging their feet. They always managed to stop, though. And now they’ve stopped for good—all excepting the Edaville.

There’s the parlor car, for instance: got air and vacuum both on her. She used to run over the Sandy River and the Phillips & Rangeley, so when they built her she had the kind of brakes used by each road—vacuum and Westinghouse. No. 4 can pile you through the front window, with those steam stoppers of hers!

Yes, these little pigs did a lot of work up there in northern Maine. You should have seen them settle down to dragging a train of slate up the hill. That Monson road always used link-and-pin couplers, too; never changed over to automatic. I don’t know how they sidestepped the Government laws, but they did. Common carrier, at that. Link-and-pin couplers, stub switches, and hand brakes; just about as modern as a ramrod rifle. Far as I know it was the last road left that hadn’t turned the century.

Here’s that switch again: he’s throwing it for the loop. In a minute we’ll be backing up through the woods and into the station. Two tracks there; we’ll clear the passenger.

Quite a trip, wasn’t it? Have a good time? Everyone does; even old timers who’ve railroaded for years. Mr. Atwood’s Edaville Railroad’s got something they never saw before!

37We’re back. See the crowd on the platform! Soon’s the train is unloaded there’s a fresh batch to take out. It’s like that all the time now. Lots of folks keep getting back on again, riding all day. Mr. Atwood doesn’t mind as long as there’s room for the new-comers. Wouldn’t some big railroads enjoy a passenger trade like this? It sure costs plenty for the Atwoods to give everyone these rides, but they’re like that: never satisfied unless they’re doing things to make other people happy—kind of sharing their good fortune with the world at large, you might say. It’s not lost, though: all adds up to good cranberry advertising, and cranberries is what makes Edaville the top-pucker plantation in the world, and this manikin railroad a lucky survivor of a less lucky kind of railroad design. Let’s go into the station.

There’s Mr. Atwood sitting up to the lunch counter with the boys, 38eating steamed clams. Wonder that man doesn’t turn into a steamed clam. Personally, I’d just as soon have baked chicken. Here: we’ll sit over by the fireplace with those yarnsters, until the clams are gone. I’m tired, anyway. Notice those things more after forty.

Is it supper time? In half an hour the Sunset Special will pull out for her curfew run. That’s a pretty train. Sunset seems to show up better out there where there’s plenty of room. We’ll stick right here so’s not to miss it.

See that headlight up on the wall? Big’s a boxcar. Came off one of the old Bridgton engines when they changed to electric glims. This one’s oil. Mr. Atwood has lots of relics in here. You’ve no idea what a show he’s got! Only difference between he and Phin Barnum is that Atwood isn’t trying to kid anybody. His is the real McCoy.

Yes: ten little railroads all switched into one: the Edaville. Did you ever stop to think why he named it that—Edaville? Can’t you guess? Sure, that’s it: his own initials, E.D.A. Pretty cute, eh?

Those old two-footers were some roads. Many of my happiest recollections are of rides I had on the Wiscasset road and the Sandy River. Never saw so much of the Bridgton line until the last year it ran. The Kennebec Central checked out before I checked in, although I used to see their tiny trains when I was a kid. I knew the little Monson—the Two by Six they called it, two feet wide and six miles long—but only after it got kind of dilapidated. I’ve seen ’em all. And here’s the last one: using the very same engines and cars that I used to ride on years ago. Seems funny, too: to come down here and find ’em resurrected again. Those little pikes tried so hard to climb up to the sun, and a bumping-post in the sunset was the best they could do. The sunset of pint-size railroads.

Funny: here’s this last one, here in eastern Massachusetts; and seventy some years ago the first one got its christening within a few miles of this very spot. Up in Billerica, where the B. & M.’s big shops are now. Someone must have swung the bottle too hard and konked the little cuss on its pituitary gland. Anyway, besides being a baptismal ceremony it was a death blow too.

40It was this way: a feller named George Mansfield from up Lowell way had taken a trip over to Wales (coal-passing, most likely) and was pretty well sold on the two-foot Festiniog Railway there. The Festiniog was the very first of these flea gauges, and had been built fifty years before George went back. He couldn’t see why they wouldn’t be just as successful over here; kind of miscalculated on his grand-children’s idiosyncrasies, though. George returned to the New World as full of ideas as a New Dealer. You might say he’d got narrow minded—two-feet wide. He bla-blaad to everyone who’d listen and when they stopped listening he hired a hall and gave away a new Ford on the lucky ticket. He talked two-feet gauge. He may have even drawn chalk pictures. He built a sample railroad in his back yard with two-by-four for rails. Named it the Sumner Heights & Somethingwood Valley. Luckily he didn’t have an eighteen hundred acre lot or the Edaville would be just another backyard railroad today.

The right people were impressed, apparently, because the folks of Bedford and Billerica fell in with his tight ideas: and the first genuine two-footer in the Western Hemisphere made the headlines.

That was in 1877. They built the Billerica & Bedford Railroad, two feet wide and eight miles too long.

Its vicissitudes don’t mean much now excepting because it was the first of these bobtailed scooters to puff into our history, and because that christening wallop was so robust the little pike turned up its brogans the very next year. Therein it suffered the doubtful honor of being not only the first fly-speck choo-choo in North America, but also the first one to ask official permission to abandon its entire line!

George, though, hadn’t been idle. Instead of staying home minding his baby he’d been rusticating in the wilds of Maine talking convincingly to the railroad minded folks up there. In fact, the spacious old Jim Hill sold ’em not only the idea, but the moribund Billerica & Bedford Railroad as well!

Yes: as a result of his glib missionary work the Sandy River Railroad made a three point landing in Farmington, Maine, complete with 43the B. & B.’s two forney locomotives, and handful of cars, and eight miles of rail. That was the real beginning of down to earth two-footing. The bantam railroad clicked up there, and it made good, too. Quicker than you can spit they’d laid eighteen miles of track up through Strong to Phillips, a good part of it on the seventy-four trestles that boosted it over gullies and ravines, and forthwith began doing more business than a beer-joint in Plymouth.

Folks were wild about it. The two-footer got kind of wild, too, because it made a record by operating on fifty-five per cent of its gross earnings. Darned few wide gauge roads ever did that! Today—well, if a road breaks even everyone walks around the table shaking hands and passing out seegars.

Oh I could gab for hours about it: how those towns raised money to build it on the express condition that trains be polluting the virgin air of Phillips by November 20, 1879 or not one blankity-blanked penny would they pay. And how, the night before, track still lacked 44half a mile of the town line—but maybe all this moldy lore of sixty-eight years ago doesn’t interest you as much as the Edaville of today—the last two-footer.

Eh? Did they make it before the fatal hour? You bet they did! Why, the gang hove to that night with axes and oxen and the way they scattered railroad track up that last half mile would make Mr. Atwood’s track-layers look like sit-down strikers. More B. T. U.’s sparked off that night than in the whole city of Boston. The little Hinckley engine, twelve tons of brass and headlight, tottered behind the galloping track gang and, just as the clock in the steeple dumped its jackpot, the last rail clattered down; and Hinckley No. 1 fumed defiantly into Phillips. The town’s check was good!

(No thank you, Mr. Atwood; I can’t eat clam sandwiches and talk at the same time. You eat it.)

46As I was saying, almost before that first train got turned around there was an avalanche of business. Exponents of the railroad were slapping each other on the back and thumbing their beaks at the sour-puss skeptics. A year or so later and all Franklin County was lathered up: everyone wanted a railroad.

Kingfield was first to get it. Somehow the Boston egg-men, A. & O. W. Mead, got snarled in it. They began their Franklin & Megantic Railroad, Strong to Kingfield, fourteen and a half miles, in 1884. It was a pretty road. Full of curves as a chorus girl and lush with wild, bucolic scenery. You could see Mount Abram looming up five thousand feet, and Mount Bigelow was still higher. At Mount Abram Junction you could almost spit on ’em, they were so close.

This little pike didn’t swell with the financial pregnancy that busted the more copious Sandy River shirt. The F. & M. was always broke. A cussed feeling, too; take it from me. Several reorganizations and the final exodus of the Mead boys made no difference. While they managed to relay the original twenty-five pound rail with bigger thirty-five pound stuff they did little grade improving or curve relocation. Track went up and around with the whims of Mother Nature, and the old harridan whimmed plenty in that rugged country.

The snow they had! You should see some of the old pictures of snow-fighting (Maybe Mr. Atwood has some here); it was nothing to see a man’s head sticking out, and then learn that he was standing on top of a boxcar.

In the early '90’s, under the paper name of Kingfield & Dead River, the F. & M. built fifteen and a half miles of road from Kingfield up through Carrabasset to Bigelow, a booming lumber town. Today Bigelow ain’t. You just drive up through there and wonder where the place was. This thirty mile line rivaled even the P. & R. in wild, rustic beauty. If only those wintry hills could have been cranberry country!

About this same time some other Massachusetts business men (See: the Bay Staters were always the power behind these midget gauges!) dumped their pennies into the twenty-nine mile Phillips & Rangeley Railroad, from Phillips up over Redington Mountain to Rangeley. You should have seen it. What a railroad. One reverse curve after another; three and four per cent grades with Sluice Hill and the Devil’s Elbow going over five per cent. Grand country, too: wooded hills spouting white-water streams—where trout frolic in the rapids and thumb their little noses at you.

49The P. & R., like the Sandy River, had kind of a Midas touch. Millions of cords of pulpwood and millions more feet of timber and logs rolled down the tortuous grades; sawmills were everywhere; boom towns, such as Sanders. Old photos show Sanders, ten miles up on the P. & R., with steam mills, stores, railroad buildings, boarding-houses and barns. Frontier prosperity. But today: well, if you pushed along the old grade you might find hidden ruins—a moss-covered foundation or a scrap of rusty boiler plate. Not a building left.

Purposive branch lines wandered through the woods, like stray cats. I don’t know who used all the lumber but quantities of it rolled out over the narrow gauge during the next thirty years.

Once they had seventeen engines working, and few went out again 50at night. Thirty-three men labored at the Farmington transfer loading freight from little cars into big ones. Two and sometimes three baby cars made one wide gauge load.

I suspect that the same money was pretty much behind all these Franklin County roads. In 1908 the big Consolidation came off: the F. & M., P. & R., the Madrid, and the old Sandy River merged into the new Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes. Three years later the Eustis Railroad joined up too, giving the new S. R. & R. L. a total of 120 miles of line—logging branches and all. Seventeen locomotives and nearly four hundred cars, including Franklin County’s pride, the Rangeley.

In 1911 the Maine Central scratched its chin reflectively, and bought the outfit, lock, stock, and ramrod.

In some ways this was a good thing. The big road made some money, and they did a lot of improving such as heavier rail, new engines and cars, as well as kind of guiding the baby to complete maturity. That caboose you just saw on the work train was one of the cars they built.

This parentage lasted eleven years. For some reason, in 1922, the Maine Central sold the jack-rabbit to a pair of local tycoons. These boys, a Kingfield lumber king and a Gardiner banker, owned it right through to the end, in 1935—June 29, to be exact.

Maybe I fumbled by telling you about the Sandy River first. She was the grand climax to the others. A modern railroad, abbreviated down to brownie size. Regular engines with eight-wheel tenders. Parlor cars. Telegraph. Air brakes. And a super machine shop where engines could be completely taken down. Most impressive of all, perhaps, crews who talked railroad, lived railroad, and could defy any others to out-railroad them!

The other roads weren’t; not so much, anyway. They used vacuum brakes or simply stuck a hickory in the brake-wheel and laid back on it. Their operation was more short-line, jerkwaterish, and patchy. The Bridgton & Saco River (and if you don’t mind, that’s pronounced SAW’ko) was nearest to the Sandy River in this kind of excellence. Maybe due somewhat to Maine Central influence, too. While the Wiscasset road was the only one to have a separate-tender engine like the Sandy River’s it wasn’t nearly as up to date and spic and span as the Bridgton line.

The B. & S. R. was built in 1882. The first train into town was on January 21 the following year, “packed with exultant citizens and numerous representatives of the rising generation”, so writes William McLin in his interesting history The Twenty-four Inch Gauge Railroad at Bridgton, Maine. The Edaville gets demonstrations of that “rising generation” idea, too!

This sixteen mile line ran from the Maine Central at Hiram up through some pretty wild country to Bridgton, and fifteen years later another six miles to Harrison was added—along the shores of Long Lake. They ran lots of trains, too. See that old time card over here on the wall: looks like a lineup of Braintree Locals.

They made money. Probably that’s why the Maine Central bought it in 1912. Like the Sandy River’s case, they made lots of improvements 53although the little tike was in pretty good shape anyway. The machine shop was in Bridgton but it wasn’t on a par with the Sandy River’s Phillips shop; most of the heavy work went to Thompson’s Point for the Maine Central to do. Mr. Atwood has that machine shop here in Edaville now.

Well, by this time people must have decided that George Mansfield was a second Moses and that his slim gauge railways puffed right into Heaven. Infection had spread like chicken-pox. The Monson Railroad, 'way up Moosehead Lake way, had been built in 1883, six miles long with a couple of miles in slate quarry spurs.

Monson slate went all over the world. Still does. Bathtubs, shingles, switchboards, and gravestones. Kind of a womb-to-tomb business, you might say. Far as I know the Monson never aspired beyond the horizon, whereas its contemporaries planned to go clear to hellangone, although none of ’em ever got there.

In a way, though, I suppose they all got there. The bubble busted twenty-five years ago and the Golden Age was on skids. Hard to say 54whether competition, cussedness, or just plain luck was the reason. Whatever it was, their teeth fell out, ribs showed through, joints ached, and Dr. Quack shook his head hopelessly.

Calamity number one came in 1929. The smallest of the lot—baby of the family, so to speak—took the colic and pegged out. The five mile Kennebec Central.

The K. C., built in the early 90’s, was used chiefly to haul things from Kennebec steamers at Gardiner to the Soldiers’ Home at Togus, coal being the biggest item. A competing trolley line from Augusta hadn’t helped their lucrative passenger business and when the benevolent Government awarded the coal haul to some trucks it didn’t leave the Kennebec Central much to live for. So, she went in her sleep. Second of the two-footers to go. The old B. & B. was first.

While I think of it: someone was asking about the little engine over to Putnam, Connecticut. William Monypeny up to Cambridge owns 55it; bought her from the W. W. & F. which had recently got it from the defunct Kennebec Central. His mile of twenty-five pound rail also came up from the K. C. (No: you can’t buy it. He wants it as much as you do!)

Four years later—at 7:23 in the morning of June 15, to keep these dates straight—the forty-four mile Wiscasset road bit the dust.

In a way the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway was the first two-footer. It was chartered 'way back in 1854. Actually, though, the narrow width wasn’t decided upon until just before construction began, in 1894.

In general interest, if not in physical excellence, I think this road rated next to the Sandy River. Maybe its long haul influenced that. Started as the Wiscasset & Quebec Railroad its history is a long complaint of frustrations and tantrums. I won’t go into it because the Sunset Special is nearly ready to go. You mustn’t miss it. Anyway, the W. & Q. was going to do big things: lay rails clear to 56Quebec Province, have de luxe trains with diners, sleepers, and parlor cars to make the Rangeley look like a trapper’s camp. They were going to swipe the million dollar grain haul away from the Grand Trunk—just like that. Wiscasset has a fine harbor and is a little nearer Liverpool than Portland, which was the basis for their stock-selling argument.

While crews were laying steel up the Sheepscot valley other men were building some old-histing great wharves at Wiscasset for the steamboat line to New York. They never splashed a paddle but to hear stock salesmen gab you’d have thought another Fall River Line was in the making.

Its first hop was to Burnham, fifty-five miles up. Old Frustration set a derail here: the Maine Central were opposed to a crossing of their Belfast branch; so submissively and sulkily the little pike backtracked to Week’s Mills (twenty-eight miles above Wiscasset) and began a line from there to Waterville and Farmington, hoping to make the Quebec trip with the help of Sandy River rails to Rangeley. However, the Maine Central again boxed the W. & Q.’s flapping ears by refusing to let ’em cross Maine Central tracks at Farmington to connect with the Sandy River.

By now the Wiscasset dwarf was a confirmed neurotic. It just threw a fit, abandoned its grand ideas and miles of nearly completed line, and testily began to operate over such track as it could be sure of—Wiscasset to Waterville (actually to Winslow, on this side of the river), and Week’s Mills to Albion. Shortly thereafter they discarded even the Winslow line, and from then until 1933 the forty-four miles from Albion down to Wiscasset was all that was left of the grandiose W. & Q. Even this imposing name faded out to the jaw-breaking misnomer Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington which folks sometimes called Weak, Weary & Feeble; just as they dubbed the B. & S. R. Busted & Still Running. Awful, wasn’t it?

The W. W. & F. was the only one of these little roads to keep the Railway Post Office route. All the others—the Farmington & Rangeley, and the Bridgton’s mailcar—were taken away during the other war. This one, though, stayed to the last run.

There were—let’s see: one, two, three ... there were ten stations on the line, some being rail points for stages from other post-offices, too. Must have been twenty or more offices served by this R. P. O.

Its worst mess of all came in 1931 when a mortgage-monger who controlled some timberlands up in Palermo got hold of the road. That’s a good story, too, but we’ll have to skip it now except to say that the road didn’t improve any under his ownership, and track got so rough there was no fun riding on it. Coming down that morning, June 15, they’d just left Whitefield station when Crash!—a broken rail. The tiny Portland engine switched ends and dove down the bank toward the river. A flatcar tail-feathered up behind her. The cream-car careened. The last Railway Post Office wobbled feebly, jolted to its last stop, and settled into the ballast for a good, long rest.

61That was the Weak, Weary & Feeble’s last trip. Wreck was never picked up. Mr. Atwood may have some pictures of that, too.

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.

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!

64Year 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!

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.

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.

66Eh? 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!

67Gosh! 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!

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 69as 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.

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 70equipment they’d like to sell him, war or no war. Would he buy?

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.

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.

Chartered in 1876; built 1877. Abandoned Jan. 1878. Sold in entirety to Sandy River R. R.

Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes R. R.

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.

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.

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 79hid 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

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.

80Coaches, 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.

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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

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

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

Ariel	0-4-4T Hinckley 1877, became S. R. No. 1
Puck	0-4-4T Hinckley 1877, became S. R. No. 2

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

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Edaville Railroad

EDAVILLE RAILROAD

The Cranberry Belt

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION