A baby boxcar is gingerly loaded onto a Hall trailer at Bridgton Junction, Maine, for its 200-mile jaunt down the Pike to South Carver. Forty cars and engines made the trip this way—without mishap.
(Atwood Photo)
Bridgton Yard was a sorry looking mess in 1945. A marked contrast to their condition in Edaville today. Roland Badger’s therapy soon restored them to their original splendor, eh?
It 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.
(Moody Photo)
A heterogeneous passenger train—conventional coaches, open-side cars, and the rubberneck-wagons on the rear; all loaded with folks having the ride-of-their-life.
(Moody Photo)