Funny how it came out: A few weeks later he was advised he might protect his ownership by moving everything to Carver at once. Mr. Atwood tartly replied that such extravagant use of transportation facilities and scarce gasoline, when our country was fighting for its life, wasn’t becoming a patriotic gentleman. Mightn’t he wait until the wars were done? An answer sizzled back! Henceforth he might not only do as he pleased, but the government had oodles of railroad equipment they’d like to sell him, war or no war. Would he buy?

He wouldn’t; then.

The wars petered out. We were allowed to use the gasoline again. Big trucks and little ones headed north in the fall of 1945, and rumbled back with loads of little cars. The City of New Bedford owned a private railroad that once hauled coal to their Water Works pumping station, and they agreed to sell. Two and a half miles of fifty-six pound steel. Three miles more came down from the mountain grades of Parker-Young Company’s logging road in New Hampshire. Ties from Maine and more from the New Haven. Crews assembled.

Some desultory track-laying began in 1946 but it wasn’t until late that fall that a former New Haven track man lined up his gang, and work began in earnest. In the car shops repairs were progressing, for the day when trains would begin to run.

Mr. Atwood did the engineering. He scooches to a transit as easily as Farmer Jones milks a cow. He personally supervised everything else, too; nothing was too small to escape his attention, no detail too mean for his august decision. Mostly his own crews did the work. When cranberry work could spare them they turned-to and became railroad men. Except for the track boss no former railroad men were hired, although Badger might as well have been an ex-Master Car Builder: he knew enough to be.

The locomotive crews are Mr. Atwood’s own cranberry men, instructed in their exotic duties and performing them with remarkable efficiency.

Friends, visitors, and well-wishers have joined in offering suggestions and criticisms to help the enterprise along. Mostly, though, it’s been a series of inspirations plus years of secret planning from Mr. Atwood himself.

Today the physical properties of his railroad are:

Miles of road: