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.
(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.
