You’d think I’d written a five-foot shelf of books instead of a small travel-guide pamphlet, if Forewords, Introductions, and Appendixes are any criteria. This is how it seems to stew out though, so it’s how you’ll have to take it. Keep cool!
Lots of you won’t be interested in this Appendix. It’s designed for the fellers who’re more or less railroad minded and thirst for technical details. It’s a brief critique about the gears and rods that made the wheels go round, during those hectic, vortical years. A cursory account of engines and cars and mileage that made up the Edaville’s immediate predecessors.
Here again we’ll have to condense the facts in favor of space. To include a really comprehensive expose of these historical lines—locomotive rosters and dimensions, car measurements and classifications, capitalizations, earnings and expenses, and blow-by-blow reports of the septuagenary rise and fall, as well as scale-drawings for model fans—would be a book in itself, and a family-Bible size at that. No one but the most serious students of railroad lore would read beyond the title page. Let’s try to jam a lot into a few pages here.
Edaville Railroad
Just when the Edaville was conceived is a risky guess. Maybe in 1941 when the moribund B. & S. R. prodded Mr. Atwood’s imagination. Maybe forty years ago when, as a lanky young feller, he mused on the pleasure of owning something better than rickety sections of portable track and tiny one-yard dumpcars.
He did something about it in 1941, anyway. They were busting up the Bridgton road. He bought the biggest part of it. Wars came. You couldn’t call your soul your own unless it was kept out of sight. Without an AA-12-PDQ-RSVP-1/2 priority there was no such thing as moving things by freight, and these coveted ratings weren’t being handed out to move narrow gauge railroads from Maine to South Carver. Unless they moved into the Community Scrap Drive, and I never understood how this one escaped those zealous patriots.
(Moody Photo)
Important in pygmy power development were the little Moguls. The Sandy River had engines with separate tenders as well as those like Mr. Atwood’s—built all in one piece.
It did have a tight squeak. Mr. Atwood was notified that his railroad equipment might be seized anytime for Government use and for him to leave it strictly alone. Engines and cars needed for self-defense—don’t touch!