The New Year’s Special puffs through the frosty Cape Cod air, telling the cockeyed world that miser gauges can run in the snow.
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 although 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.
(Moody Photo)
W. W. & F. No. 4 and 11-car train (including the last Railway Post Office on 24-inch gauge track) leaves Wiscasset for her 44-mile run to Albion, in 1932.
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 whether 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.