Central Maine Solstice Road Trip

The DT&I Fan and I took advantage of the extended daylight hours to make an wide sweeping tour of central and coastal Maine to check out various rail sites, active and not. We missed the Solstice by one day (June 22) but it was close enough and the weather was nearly perfect.

Our first real stop was Brunswick to check on the Downeaster's progress. There was a nearly completed "Brunswick Station" shopping complex and a crane working on the platforms. After a quick look we moved on downeast along Rt. 1.
http://www.amtrakdowneaster.com/expansion-project

At Wiscasset we turned north on 218 to Alna Center and the WW&F at Cross Rd. Here I finally dug out a camera. I ended up sticking with the digital "110 Instamatic" for the day. We had just gotten out of the truck to look around when a local volunteer stopped by to see what we were up to. We ended up having a nice chat. He told us a bit about their operations and the latest restorations. It was a pleasure to talk to someone who enjoyed what he was doing.

The neatest piece of news came when I asked about the boiler that was sitting in the yard. That's the black tank next to the ubiquitous blue tarp. I had noticed that the frame underneath was about the size of a locomotive. The local informed us that this was locomotive #9 and it is the only original WW&F loco on the property. In fact a full scale portrait of it is on the roof of the house next door. He also informed us that all the parts are ready to assemble back into a locomotive. It will be cool to see the finished unit in action on it's home rails again. That will be a fine excuse to drive over there again.

I asked about how far they can go with their present plans. They have about 2 miles of roadbed to Head Tide to build on before they encounter another road crossing. That's the plan for now. He speculated about how neat it would be to go the other way to Wiscasset and rebuild the piers. Of course, he also mentioned that he'd like to set up a sign behind Reds Eats with photos of the old piers in the meantime. The second photo shows the current end of the line at Sheepscot station. No crossing means no F.R.A. compliance needed. Imagine the additional D.E.P. and E.P.A. involvement with restoring the extensive piers in Wiscasset a few miles beyond and you see why it stops here, for now. http://www.wwfry.org/


Onward to Rockland and the Maine Eastern. We stopped off at the yard and then the depot. We found an intriguing extended vision caboose tied up next to the plow. It was in good shape and in primer paint. We didn't have any idea what it's heritage was. The normal 3 car train and FL-9 was sitting by by depot but all was quiet. We wondered who built the observation car originally.

We thought we should take a look at the end of the line where Dragon transloads cement to barges. A couple of three packs of cement cars were sitting at the loading facility. It's well marked and fenced in so we merely took a couple of shots and moved on.


From Rockland we set out for lunch and the Belfast & Moosehead Lake RR. Although we really didn't want to go into Belfast since they lifted the rails, we did go to the edge of the township known as City Point to see the City Point Central Railroad Museum. Though we limited our visit to the parking lot, from there you can see some cool stuff, most notably 70 tonner #51. There were samples of cabooses and rolling stock around, and even samples of structures. The City Point depot is the former MEC depot from Corinna. I noted the former MEC cabooses built by International Car, one standard and one extended vision. Since Atlas makes both in N-scale, I wanted detail shots of both for future tweaks.


We left City Point headed cross country toward Brooks. We found lots of empty tracks and eventually found the Brooks depot, home of the Brooks Preservation Society. They have 70 tonner #53, a caboose, a couple of passenger cars and the open air car from the old B&ML. They had a schedule of excursions posted and the rails betrayed some use.

Brooks was the station where "Maine Two Footers" author Linwood Moody began working for the railroad. Plus it's just a prime example of small town depots. The runaround track behind the building looked like if just barely met minimum FRA standards, but it works.
http://www.brookspreservation.org/


We turned our attention toward Searsport. That meant going back toward Belfast to cross the bay on Rt. 1. Access to the old BAR facilities has dropped to near nil now and nothing was moving anyway, so we didn't shoot any photos. In the past we found old relics to photograph and have even ended a train chase here once with Joey "Purple Trains" Kelly. But today the pickins were pretty slim. On to the depot.

The old depot has been moved over to Rt. 1 and turned into an ice cream parlor. Of course that meant we had to partake and support such an enterprise. Lately they've expanded to include a former "Doodlebug" RPO car as a hamburger stand. A crew was still building the deck for it, but it was well painted to match the depot. Of course this begged the question of who's unit this was once upon a time? I certainly didn't have a clue unless the BAR or MEC had it as a maintenance car, which makes the most sense.

From Searsport we ventured up Rt. 1 to Bucksport, crossing the new cable stay bridge for our first time. From the dockside park at the former MEC Bucksport depot, the bridge and Fort Knox are clearly visible. The bridges' silhouettes almost look like a single bridge from this vantage point too. You can also see the present end of the line serving the large Verso Paper mill. It wasn't that long ago that yard tracks extended to the depot.

The yard area is pretty neat if you are into industrial facilities. We found the switcher working alongside route 15 and you could see the bulk of the yard and turntable from the road. The place was full of cars of all types. Just beyond the mill, where the switches begin, a couple of MOW shacks were set up. You could still see the old speeder doors on one of them. The compact scene was spotted on the fly by Carl who had to swing the truck around to check it out.

We followed the line to Brewer but didn't know enough to dig very deep around former customers like Eastern Paper or Norchem, so we headed to Northern Maine Jct. At that point we saw about 3 PAR units in the usual places from the parking lot. As we headed out, the scanner came alive. Apparently PONM had just arrived and was parked just beyond our view from the parking lot. It was buried so we didn't pursue it. As we left to head over to the LMS side of the vast junction, we also heard a WASJ symbol. It was tying down at MP 50 or so. We had no clue what it was for a second. I was thinking signal skip and St. Johnsbury for some reason. As it turns out this was a train that Skull had mentioned to me on the phone the day before: a "hotshot" from Waterville to St. John. Via scanner, we did hear it was re-crewed and moving a few hours later. But, we weren't going to head over Old Town just to scope out another "Guilford" train that wasn't moving.

As we headed south on I-95 we decided to head into Pittsfield. This area is a former home of "The Fiddler" and a far-fetched and unlikely home to some fond memories around the old depot. It was here in 1987, when I had just moved here that the DT&I fan (visitor rather than resident then) and I dropped by to visit the depot. A local asked us if we were there to see the passenger train. Not having any idea what he was talking about, we asked about it and stuck around for what turned out to be a GRS inspection train. What luck! That gave us some good memories to start off with.

Quite a few years later, as we began to know some railfans in the area, it turned out that we knew quite a few with a Pittsfield connection. A local historian/railfan asked the Wheelman to put on a slide show in the depot and the feat was repeated a year or so later. Of course we returned for a visit or two to the Fiddler's as well.

The next logical stop after Pittsfield is Waterville. However, we didn't quite get there. We were following the old MEC down route 100/11 when the scanner betrayed a Form D for the Sappi local beyond CPF 110 to go up the branch. We were already past Clinton so we were near enough to catch it and there was plenty of daylight left. Clouds were beginning to close on the distant horizon but they might hold off for a chase to Skowhegan.

As it turned out we were able to beat the train to CPF 110 in Fairfield and get set up for photos. We then headed for the crossing near the I-95 interchange. There I had to dodge a lot of poison ivy at that spot but it was pretty photogenic given the location. We got way ahead to the crossing in Shawmut. We had a pretty good wait there as a mom told her kids about the approaching train. She thought one had just been through already.

Since the train makes the screaming speed of maybe 10mph on the branch, the hardest part of shooting pictures is waiting for the train to catch up. We were easily able to get ahead to the Goodwill Hinckley School. Just to the north along Rt. 201 is a scenic little bridge where we pulled over for another wait. The sun was nearly ideal for this spot. I should have used my good camera, but not with a "turbo G" unit on the front. (I'll regret that in about 30 years!)

The next stop was the angled crossing before getting to the mill property. This Rt. 201 crossing was a little over 3 Omya tankers long and provided a pretty good view of the train. A shorter private crossing next to this one seemed to be a good place for a yard worker to check off the incoming cars too. I was on the wrong side of the train when it passed so as I walked back I noticed that the slow moving 54 car train had really backed up the highway traffic. I could see cars lined up nearly a mile off toward the mill. We left the train at that point and headed south.

We saw a string of cars pulled through the Waterville yard office area when we arrived there. Sure enough it moved after we stopped in the lot. A cut was left behind in the yard and the rest tacked onto a future NMPO along with two "turbo G" units. We got to watch a few minutes of switching anyway. Since the crew bailed out for a break, we knew it would not move any time soon, so we bailed out too.

The trip home was pretty uneventful except for a stop at the Augusta Amato's for dinner. We'd seen a lot for one day. Not a bad catch either for essentially a "recon" run. The scanner was pretty much dead heading south through the usual detour to Leeds Jct. However, this is when we heard the dispatcher talking to someone. It turned out he was talking to trains around Bangor, including a now moving WASJ. We still had some daylight as it was only about 7:30pm so we thought we see if SLR's 393 was stirring yet. No luck there but in the process we heard a NMPO (?) come to life (re-crew?) at Rumford Jct. We ended the day watching this train rumble through Danville Jct. By this time the cloud cover was thickening enough that photos were not possible but it was still light enough to see (about 8:15pm). The power was two 500's sandwiching the 601.

Not a bad way to finish a very good day.



BC