(Moody Photo)
Ted Goodreau throws the switch, backing a work train into the gravel pit. She’ll emerge from the spur with some 20 yards of sand for ballasting purposes.
(Atwood Photo)
This tiny Brooksville locomotive with 13 1-yard dumpcars was Mr. Atwood’s construction train last year.
As 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!