Well, let’s go up into the baggage car now; watch your step again!
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.
(Atwood Photo)
Here’s how the flatcars were trucked down from Maine; loaded three-deep on a C. E. Hall & Sons diesel trailer.
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 the 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.