so on a nice late spring day, let's take the ferry to new london connecticut, let's pick up michael from the amtrack station, and let's drive to bath maine, our headquarters for a steam train photo excursion at the ww&f railway museum, a one day fundraiser by the museum, done on 4/14 and on 4/21, the day michael and i attended. i am first going to give an introduction to the museum by posting scanned pages from the nice booklet given out to the participants i know, a lot of post for no steam train photos, well they are coming, i have been on narrow gauge before, but this is the first 2 footer for me, the tracks look so small but these were popular and productive trains at one time, and this booklet was very nicely done and full of cool facts about the museum and the line's history it would be a shame not to share it oh all right a teaser shot, a 2 foot gauge steam locomotive, taking on water after being fired up
I am old enough to remember the train station at Wiscasset. We would come from Boothbay Harbor to meet or drop off people traveling from or to New York City. I can still see the Railway Express wagons waiting to off-load baggage. With the trains heading South, you could see them coming in a long curve over the Sheepscot River before they pulled into the station.
this was the house of the museum founder harry percival, who designed, and nailed in place what you see here, roof shingles making a full size replica of #9 and the lone boxcar they had from the original days #9 at the water tank from the other side, we had occasional clouds, but overall a pretty nice day for late spring in maine and we had free run of the yard, just watch out for the moving train, here they are backing onto the turntable, to align with another track, making up the morning train
so here we are turning #9 over to another yard track, and that's right folks, you may have heard of an armstrong turntable, well here it is, you do this all day you arms be strong. this turntable has a 2 manpower engine pulling our coach out of the shed, ww&f has been able to build some nice shop buildings for working on the various rolling stock projects, and to keep what they have pristine not a toy, this is a real live restored steam engine that worked this line, it just sort of takes awhile of looking at it to get used to it, your brain keeps going, what's up with the perspective??
so i just realized i apparently have several incomplete threads on here, so i thought i would try over the next couple of weeks to get this situation cleaned up, there was a whole day of ww&f charter, but i only showed the start?? hopefully michael has some ready and this is authentic railroading, right down to the use of hand brakes, on the roof no less, here we have backed onto the box car and now need to release the brakes, so you climb the roof and turn the wheel the line is surprisingly swampy, but then again we are not far from coastal maine, the railroad starts in a little spot on the map called alna again it takes a little getting used to that 2 foot gauge
out through the station window alna center station, really just a whistle stop, milk can shed type we are out in the woods here ok, here comes the coolest part of the day, they are recreating the scrapping of the line, right down to the original flatcar that picked up the rail, they had to replace 300 feet of rail so they'll did it all by hand and horse team
so they recreated from the old photograph, horse teams were used because by the time the line was scrapped the ww&f had no engines left, the rail was repo'ed a by a paint company for an unpaid debt and sold as salvage against the lien our team pulling the very same flatcar used back then no machines under sed here, just brute force and hand tools lift that rail on the cadence and slide it onto the flat car the drover handles the team, the brakeman spins the wheel to stop and the whole process gets repeated, until 300 foot of old rail is up this team is brought to the museum to do sleigh rides during christmas special events
after the rail work session there was a dinner break, and then a night session inside the shop and outside, the inside scene was a posed scene of a mechanic working on an old car from that era maybe the work truck for the mow crew. i converted most of mine to black and white, i feel that made for more dramatic scenes actually, now that i look At these i realize that was an old narrow gauge version of a galloping goose passenger/packages type car what did i do now, better get this fixed before the boss gets back
Gary did a good job covering the charter, so I'll only add a couple of mine. Making up the consist in the yard: Scrapping the line: Early morning in the yard: Man and Machine:
