I'm a Maine Narrow Gauge Fan, and I'm also a film fan.
The "Film Fan" part of it is actually because of the Two Footers. When I was in high school, Sunday River Productions had ads in railfans' magazines for Super-8 prints of railroad films. I was already big into the Two Footers at the time, so when I saw titles like "Two Foot Gauge in Maine" and "The Bridgton and Harrison", I scraped together whatever money a high school kid could and bought some prints.
I also got a movie camera and started making films of my own. In 1982 a couple of friends and I went to Railfan's day at Edaville, and I shot a film that day. We rode the Model T track car and paid extra to ride in the cab of B&SR #8. I also shot some films at the SR&RL museum: one color and one black and white.
It was great fun at the time, but certain...distractions got in my way: college, dating, career, marriage, homeownership!
About the turn of this century, I went on the internet and tried to find out when 8mm film died out and in as a surprise result went into it deeper than ever! I got sound, got several cameras, got a bunch of projectors, and built myself a little home theater including video projection and a sound system that can rattle my wife's china-closet and scare the cats!
I also made some more films including a vintage style WW&F film around 2002. (My first visit!)
It's a great hobby: all sorts of technical challenges restoring and maintaining old equipment and frankly with eBay out there it's almost TOO easy to find films. I get together with a bunch of other film collectors at least twice a year and we have these great weekends showing films. (The crowd there has come to expect at least one railroad film from me!)
What brings us here today is a couple of weeks ago, I was on e-Bay looking for film prints and struck just a little bit of 2-Foot Gold! There was a reel of 16mm home movies containing some time at Edaville, and I just had to have it. I've watched it a few times now and it's like a window two-thirds of a century back!
Whoever filmed it had a passion for boats and trains. It starts out showing the departure of the Nantucket ferry, and it ends on the St. Lawrence in Montreal.
What matters especially here is the middle part: a loop around Edaville in 1959. That year is special because that is the date that Linwood Moody published The Maine Two Footers. Edaville on this film really resembles the black and white present-day pictures in Mr. Moody's great book.
We see Monson #4 leading coaches lettered "Bridgton and Saco River" and "Wiscasset and Quebec" (#3), and "Phillips and Rangeley" and then about three excursion cars and an SR&RL long caboose. This caboose is special to me: when I was a young kid, the same week Apollo 11 landed on the moon, my family went to Massachusetts to visit relatives in New Bedford, and we all went up to South Carver and rode in that caboose. I didn't figure out exactly what that meant for maybe another 10 years! Dad sad it was "narrow gauge", (-whatever that meant to a second-grader...). In my early teens I thought maybe "3 foot", but a few years later I knew better.
On screen, it's a beautiful, bright day with blue skies. #4 is in spotless condition, with a silver smokebox and diamond stack. Once aboard the train, the whole crowd has opted for the excursion cars, so the coaches are empty. The cameraman is standing in one of them with the train in motion and we can see the coach in front bending around the curves through the open platform doors. The scenery is sweeping past the windows. The camera is also out on the open cars for a while, and I would pick the landscapes out as the old Edaville anytime. What's interesting is the direction around the loop. I've been to Edaville maybe five times over the years, and the trains always ran counter-clockwise around the loop (Cranberry Junction Station on the fireman's side). In this film, the station looks like it's on the engineer's side (-clockwise around the loop).
The film is Kodachrome, perfect color and great condition. If I didn't know any better, you could fool me that it was shot last summer. What the photographer never meant this to be was a spectacular show of 1950s American cars in beautiful (-well: "new") shape. (Despite all that, it very much succeeds!)
16mm itself is kind of surprising: back in the day that would have been a premium format for home movies, but it looks like our filmmaker was pretty serious about it and at least this time not gone Standard-8mm. It is nicely filmed: maybe an amateur, but if so a pretty skilled one.
It's kind of sad: there is no context here. I have no idea who shot it, or if any of the people on film are special to whoever has the camera. There is some scribble on the film can about the names of a couple of ships and (of course) Edaville #4. There was a bulk grain carrier on the St. Lawrence that was only 4 years old at the time of filming that was scrapped in India about 4 years ago (-so Google says...). I bet when whoever made this film was standing next to their projector decades ago, there was a spoken story, but that's probably gone now. Whoever's memories these were, they are now mine to preserve.
-maybe in a small way, I'm now a Historian!
