(Moody Photo)
Engineer Knight and Fireman Young bat a freight train across the bog, and will shortly return loaded with red, sour bog-nuggets (cranberries, to you).
He’d been keeping tabs on it anyway and when this junk-shark (he came from Massachusetts, too!) began wrecking things Mr. Atwood A-carded up there, plum full of adrenaline, and managed to buy quite a lot of equipment. No. 7 engine, some cars, and the turntable. Paid through the nose for it, too. Worse still, after paying the money and assuming ownership, this junk-expert would turn around and cut it up for scrap, claiming he didn’t know that Mr. Atwood wanted it! Biggest wonder in the world he didn’t put the torch to No. 7 engine.
This was all in 1941. That fall the track was gone and the cars stored at Bridgton Junction. The connoisseur who’d previously bought the parlor car, Eric Sexton of Rockport, Maine, also bought some of these B. & S. R. cars for the same reason—to preserve ’em for posterity. Another fan, Edgar Mead, bought two or three. John Holt and Van Walsh, who’d fallen in love with No. 8 engine, bought her. That greasy junkman sure cleaned up on those fellers. In the end, however, Mr. Atwood owned it all and got a corner on two-foot gauge railroads!
Year ago last fall he arranged with the Somerville movers, C. E. Hall & Sons, to bring the things down here. He’d talked with the railroad people but there were car shortages then, and besides the Maine Central had dismantled their siding there at the Junction. He’d have had to done the loading, to I. C. C. specifications, whereas the Hall crews did it if he shipped by truck. So, the last of the two-foot gauges came home to Massachusetts—by truck!
Quite a sight seeing a railroad whizzing down the Boston road.
Newspapers and magazines played it up plenty. Still do, in fact. Mr. Atwood’s name is in the news more than any railroad man since Peter Cooper or Jim Hill. The idea of his little Edaville Railroad seems to click.
(Atwood Photo)