Messages

1

Massachusetts' Two Footers / Re: Edaville in 1959 on 16mm film

« on: January 27, 2026, 10:32:14 AM »

Hi Bruce,

You have basically doubled my knowledge of Newell Martin in one post! I still know very little about him!

All I really knew about him is he was a close friend of Linwood Moody, he made an important SR&RL film and he died young. (Do you have any idea what happened?)

Google is kind of useless here: There is a book out there "Lectures Delivered to the Employees of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company" delivered by H. Newell Martin that seems promising until you find out it was published in 1882: not the same guy!

Linwood Moody not getting to Colorado is a real shame: that trip would have to have produced at least one great book!

Newell Martin having gotten to Colorado means there probably is or was more 16mm out there somewhere. The problem is that film (like any photographic medium) needs to be treated with care or it can degrade. There's a decent chance that there was a lot more film of the Two Footers out there that is just lost to time which we can never see. Sometimes all it takes is some well-meaning soul deciding to "save Dad's movies"...in the attic!

16mm came out in 1933 and all of a sudden there were all these amateur filmmakers out there looking for interesting things to film: there's the possibility. Still the same, it needs to survive into our times to make a difference. (That 35mm, 1920s WW&F film is the Holy Grail here!)

Early Sunday River cuts of Two Foot Gauge in Maine show a man in a suit and a fedora talking to Dana Aldrich next to #24's cab. I wonder if given that he started the project if this gent is actually a young Hugh Mongomery.  (I've bought several looking for a print in good condition and not printed on color stock: better Black & White than Red & White!)

I know the gift shop at SR&RL very well! About 35 years ago my girlfriend (now my wife) worked there one or two weekends a year! As young and crazy as we were back then, we would drive 8 hours up to Phillips on Friday, be at SR&RL all weekend and get back home Sunday night for work Monday morning!

We live about halfway out on Long Island and got socked pretty hard on Sunday. I have two advantages: a snowblower and a college-aged son! So far, I still go out and work with him: maybe some winter soon I'll just stand in the doorway with a hot cup of coffee and yell out that "That's NOT how I did it!"

Maybe he'll move out on his own! Maybe I'll get a lawn tractor with a plow! (-always wanted one!)

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Massachusetts' Two Footers / Re: Edaville in 1959 on 16mm film

« on: January 26, 2026, 01:22:18 PM »

Sounds Good, Bruce!

These old films are something special. Any railfan alive today missed out on standing trackside and seeing one of the historic Maine 2-Foot lines operating. These films are our only chance today.

The films often have interesting back-stories, for example the Newell Martin films were shot by a friend of Linwood Moody during the same railfan trips that eventually led to Mr. Moody writing the Maine Two Footers.  The book is dedicated to his memory since he died young.

I found out about another back-story on my own. Albert G. Hale was a great rail photographer and film maker. He made a film called Two Foot Gauge in Maine which was eventually published on Super-8 and 16mm by Sunday River Productions. (later on VHS and DVD too...)

I found out about this when I was 16-17 years old: a high school kid, broke, and without wheels. I had already read The Maine Two Footers. and The Maine Scenic Route and I was pretty hooked on SR&RL. I had to see this one! I typed a letter and rode my bike up to the bank and got a money order. After that I headed to the post office. 

I was IN!

This reel showed up in the mail, but I had a problem! NO Projector: we were a 35mm slide family! I had all the patience of a typical teenage kid, so I did the entirely unreasonable thing: I peeled back my blankets and started unspooling this 200 Foot reel of film on the bedsheets. As a teenager I could actually see what was going on inside a Super-8 frame (-in my sixties? -not so much!), so this did the job for the moment. Maybe a week later the lady across the street showed it on her projector and screen, and that Christmas, my parents bought my my own projector.

OK: That's the boring part, here's where it gets interesting!

A couple of years passed and I got a driver's liscense and a car. I started to go up to Phillips and I got to know the Phillips Historical Society. I also learned the back story of Two Foot Gauge in Maine while I was up there.

Hugh Montgomery by then was kind of an Elder Statesman in Phillips. At many things around town that benefitted the area, you might find him lending  a hand. He ran the Railroad Room at the Historical Society and was often found at work at the railroad museum across the river. His wife, Elizabeth Beal Montgomery was descended from the same Beals that were so important to Phillips and the SR&RL. Her father was once the president of the Sandy River RR.

Saturday Night at every Old Home Days, Hugh Hosted "An Everning of SR&RL Memories" featuring Two Foot Gauge in Maine  and the Newell Martin film projected on 16mm. I went every time I could!

I once spent a week at the SR&RL with a friend: our "rent" for the week was being two young bodies willing to help get ready for Old Home Days. We helped paint Ariel's boiler and caboose 556: still a road trailer on the lawn behind the Historical House before she got trucks again. We also learned how to change rotten ties over at the railroad. (-under supervision, of course.)

The Montgomeries saw to it that we were well fed! We ate at their home several nights that week. We enjoyed their hospitality and they liked young people (-even from away) wanting to help out.

Hugh told me that Albert G. Hale was a friend of his at Harvard. In the Spring of 1935 it was becoming obvious that the SR&RL's days were numbered, so Hugh invited Mr. Hale to come North with his movie camera and film what he could while there was still time. The Hale footage was shot with literally weeks left before operations ceased. Scrapping was already in progress north of Phillips  and many of the trains are mostly flatcars loaded with scrap rail headed for Farmington.

After he went to Phillips and became an early Maine 2ft. fan, Albert G. Hale went on to film #3 operating on the Monson and a handcar ride along the Sheepscot on the WW&F, since operations had ceased years before. He filmed so much on the B&SR that Sunday River published this as a seperate reel with a couple of minutes of Belfast and Moosehead Lake at the end. (This was my second film.) 

Albert G. Hale went on to shoot 16mm of many different lines. I have prints of films by him of Central Vermont, Colorado and Southern and Boston and Maine plus one of miscellaneous New England shortlines. Since they are all silent, I often enjoy them when I need to keep my on-screen railfanning quiet!

He saw to it before his death that his library was archived: it would have been a huge waste to lose it. 

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Massachusetts' Two Footers / Re: Edaville in 1959 on 16mm film

« on: January 14, 2026, 10:14:11 AM »

I am agreeable to doing this (-and grateful...), and I would be willing to share the Edaville footage too.

I'd imagine this sharing would involve a transfer to digital format: not everybody has a working Kodak Pageant like I do! (-built for use in schools: simple and rugged like an Army Jeep! It will outlast us all!)

The next night I watched the Super-8 "Two Foot Gauge in Maine" and "Bridgton and Harrison". The B&H film is actually a great film for New Years Day since it begins with a ride up the line in their Chevrolet railbus on January 1st, 1937.  I watched it January 1st, 2017 and saw backwards exactly 80 years.

This film has footage shot in the cab of #8 in the late 1930s. When I was at Edaville on railfan's day, I bought the extra ticket (-maybe the best 5 bucks I've ever spent!) and I rode on the fireman's side of #8 in that exact spot. I happened to have my Super-8 camera and a bunch of film cartridges. I did my best to duplicate the Albert G. Hale footage in the original film. I still have this film and watched it last summer. When I shot it, I was a college kid. Now I'm not very far from retirement.

I did this wedged between the firebox side and the cab wall.  This should have been kind of sweaty on a June day, but it had been raining that entire day and it was cold and damp. I was never more comfortable that whole day than during that 5.5 miles. THIS was worth 5 bucks all by itself!

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Massachusetts' Two Footers / Edaville in 1959 on 16mm film

« on: January 13, 2026, 02:29:41 PM »

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!     

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Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes Railroad / Re: Visit 9/29/19

« on: October 17, 2019, 04:41:57 PM »

Mike,

Your spin on your wife's day has my admiration. When it's MY wife's day it usually involves me seated on a couch having conversation with some really uninteresting people!

-although I guess the three of us in Sheepscot this Annual Picnic just may count as MY day!

I like your pictures! When I was about 25 my friend and I camped a week at Phillips just before Old Home Days: tented next to the north abutment of the covered bridge. We earned our keep by helping them to paint caboose 556 and Ariel's boiler.

We used to go there twice a year and have a lot of great memories!   

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Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes Railroad / Re: Farmington Yard Today

« on: November 02, 2018, 02:31:14 PM »

Wow!

They really DID pave paradise and put up a parking lot!

I'm glad I got up the Franklin County when I did: there was more to see there then than a few years later.  For example, I got to see Kingfield station still in place before it was torn down.

It's still good to stand in these places: it helps you to orient yourself when you are looking at old photos and film footage.  I went to Bridgton Junction about 5 years ago and found not much but mosquitoes and "No Trespassing" signs.  I have Sunday River's "Bridgton and Harrison" and there's a scene with a train passing the camera with a steel bridge in back. After I went there all of a sudden I realized the train was coming north out of the junction yard and the bridge in back was where the Maine Central crossed the Saco River. (I'd been looking at this footage for maybe 30 years at this point!)

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Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes Railroad / Farmington Yard Today

« on: October 11, 2018, 03:33:46 PM »

So what is Farmington Yard like today?

When I was 20 years old, I went up to Franklin County for the first time and I did some exploring: I went to all of the major towns on SR&RL and found all of the yards and stations I could.

Farmington was great: being that the Maine Central was still there it was very easy to still imagine it as the SR&RL junction. Access was very good: I walked up into the old transfer yard and the raised grades needed for the SR&RL's  lower floor heights were still obvious.  I found a line of really shredded looking old ties off in the weeds. I kept a small piece: it smelled of cedar. I whittled it down to On2 size, brought it home and made a tie in my own SR&RL.

My timing turned out to be very good: the next summer when I went back, the Maine Central was gone.

A couple of years later a Spring flood took down the Maine Central's steel bridge over the Sandy River.

I became very involved in the museum line for several years, but usually bypassed Farmington and headed direct to Phillips.

Since then they've built a movie theater (Narrow Gauge Cinemas) on the former yard. I think they moved the station house too.

It's nice of them to honor the SR&RL this way, but  have the changes obliterated it as a historic site?

Is access as good as it once was?

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Massachusetts' Two Footers / A Two Foot Memory

« on: July 18, 2018, 12:43:46 PM »

I have family near New Bedford, Mass. When  I was seven years old my family did a great vacation up near them.

It was a great week. I got to hang out with my cousins, we visited my Mom's aunt and uncle in Fair Haven and while we were at their house, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and we watched it on their ancient TV. We visited the Battleship Massachusetts and I got my very first ride in a narrow gauge train over at Edaville.

-just maybe this experience would cost me thousands twenty years down the road!

The real point of my story is we stayed at a campground near Rochester. It was a great week, there was a pond there with frogs, I got to see my Dad light a campfire with wet wood using gasoline (he wasn't a patient man...,) and there was this really unique trailer on one of the campsites.

Even to a first grader (going into second), it was obvious that this was meant to look like a caboose. It was red, it had a cupola and end platforms. To an SR&RL fan, almost 50 years later,  it's even more obvious that it was meant to look like an SR&RL long caboose!

Given the proximity I'd say somebody with a pretty respectable tie-in to Edaville built this thing so they could stay close by in style!

Has anybody out there ever seen it?

If I was a modern 7 year old, I probably would have snapped a picture with my Cell, but for me that finally came nine years later on 35mm at East Broad Top.

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Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes Railroad / Re: Pics from 8/19/16 visit to the SR&RL with Monson no. 3

« on: September 30, 2016, 06:43:51 PM »

Have to see if he could cope with there being no App. for trackwork!

So there we are resident at SR&RL for a whole week and they left us the keys....

We went into the section house and found this pump handcar welded together out of maybe 1/2" plate steel! (RUGGED, it was!)

The two of us together couldn't have weighed half what this thing did, but we wrestled it out to the track.

Thing of it is there is a fine balance between torque and speed and this was more on the "torque" end of the spectrum. So we got out there and pumped furiously and got up to maybe a brisk walk. Not too long afterwards our skinny college-kid arms (wasn't on the football team...) got tired and we wrestled it back into the section house.

-but we joined up long term and eventually made friends with their rotary hand-car...

-now that's a hand car!

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Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes Railroad / Re: Pics from 8/19/16 visit to the SR&RL with Monson no. 3

« on: September 28, 2016, 02:13:15 PM »

Wonderful Stuff!,

Back when I was about 20 and in college, my friend and I were going to go up to Rangeley and camp for a week and then come back to Phillips for Old Home Days on the way home. We jumped off Rt. 4 so I could show him the railroad. We were walking down the ROW when who did we meet but Mack Paige, there for pre-Old Home Days track work.

We worked with him for a while and he gave us Vacation Plan "B": stay in Phillips and help out at the SR&RL all week. So we lived in the station and somebody found us something to do many days. Both Ariel's  boiler and caboose #556 were still over behind the Historical House and we helped paint them both. #556 was fitted out to be a trailer back then, but she gut trucks a few years later.

At night, we'd go back over to the station and cook the kind of food only a college kid lives on, and take a dip in the Sandy River so we wouldn't stink!

-wasn't all glamorous: one day we helped Hugh Montgomery haul boxes of books out on the lawn of the Historical Society for a book sale. Wasn't for nothing: I still have the autographed Herbert Hoover book I found there.

I have responsibilities these days and it's tough to get up to Maine for a weekend at the railroads, but then again I have a 14 year old son and a car that can do the trip without leaving me walking on the shoulder.

-maybe it's time to live those days as much as I can again!

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Other Narrow Gauge / Re: Facebook Narrow Gauge Russia

« on: June 22, 2015, 07:44:20 PM »

It's a fascinating place: kind of at the crossroads of the major far east powers, which means depending on who held the upper hand militarily at the moment, they marched in and kicked the other guy out.

The Russians took it from the Japanese in 1945. The Japanese took it from the Russians 40 years before.

We were in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capitol city. The Soviets doing business the ways the Soviets did, when they marched into Toyohara (The Japanese name) they tore down every building but the governor's palace, rebuilt with Soviet buildings, established Lenin square, and gradually shoved the Japanese residents onto boats headed for Hokkaido when mainland Russians showed up to take their place (most of whom didn't really want to move there...).  There were many Koreans there who the Japanese brought as slave labor to work the coal mines. The Soviets wouldn't let them go. After the end of the Soviet Union some of their descendants tried moving to South Korea and found they weren't really at home there either.

It's like Hokkaido: very mountainous and quite beautiful.

I would loved to have seen the railroad run, but we were there as part of a group and not allowed to run loose. All I could do was press my face against the window whenever we drove across a crossing!

It was obviously some kind of narrow gauge, but I didn't find out until I got home and Googled it!

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Other Narrow Gauge / Re: Facebook Narrow Gauge Russia

« on: June 22, 2015, 04:05:02 PM »

Years ago I was on Russia's Sakhalin Island (I talk about it somewhere else here...)

This was a northern Prefecture of Japan until the Soviets came flooding in during the last weeks of WWII and booted them out. It's been Russian ever since. As a consequence, the Soviet and then the Russian governments operated a decent sized 42" narrow gauge line for 60 years, including Japanese Steam left behind until the late 1970s.

Since the end of Soviet days they've discovered the place has huge resources of oil and natural gas and have decided to integrate the island more closely with mainland Russia. (Part of the Problem: Japan still wants it back.)  Part of this  move is a possible direct connection to the Russian Railways system by a fixed bridge or tunnel to Siberia, but first they want to fix their gauge disconnect.

The old Cape Gauge system is becoming dual gauged right now with Russian Standard Gauge (5',0"). It's entirely possible some day not very long from now they'll do what they did from Alamosa to Antonito: lift that middle rail and call it a day.

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Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes Railroad / Re: Abandoned "Track" of the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes

« on: June 03, 2015, 11:37:39 AM »

I remember in the late 1980s a couple of friends and I went up to Phillips over a weekend in the early spring. There had been some pretty spectacular flooding in the Sandy River Valley (this may be the year that the concrete bridge on Rt. 4 washed out just north of Farmington.)

We camped out in our usual spot right next to the covered bridge abutment. We noticed that there were a bunch of really old cars laying at all sorts of odd angles on the opposite bank. There was what looked like a 1920s Dodge and some Model Ts and an early 1950s Oldsmobile (-crushed but still shiny).

We asked the local guys what this was about, and they said it was rip-rap put there to help shore up the river bank though town and the current had washed the soil and brush around them away. By the time I went back, they weren't visible any more.

I have to think some railroad scrap was used the same way somewhere. I'm sure it's not restorable at all, but it's probably out there.

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Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes Railroad / Abandoned "Track" of the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes

« on: May 29, 2015, 11:51:36 AM »

Of course we know that the SR&RL was pulled up (mainly) in 1936, but we should also know that nobody's perfect. It's hard to imagine they got every inch of track, everywhere. Many railroads have disused spurs that become disconnected from the main. It's hard to imagine the scrappers always being motivated enough to wade through the brush and around the trees and away from the flatcar with the ramp and winch to get a couple more lengths of rail when they have a bunch on the flatcars already and they just want to get back to town and have dinner.

Back in my Sandy River Railroad Park days. Mack Paige told me of a find they made while out prospecting. They used to go off looking for useful stuff long forgotten. Once they recovered a couple of sets of freight car wheels from Toothaker Pond, for example.

On this one day, they were looking around in the woods near Madrid Village.  Mack was walking through the leaf litter on the ground when all of a sudden he stumbled over something very solid, he had a feeling about it so he fished around with his toe about two feet further along and it happened again! He dug down and found two rails. The spikes were still there, but the ties were long gone. This "track" stretched at least a hundred feet, sort of in gauge except where the trees had made it otherwise.

They thought about trying to salvage it, but they were a long way from the road and this would be a hard carry. In the end they decided the best thing was to just leave it in place: a tiny remnant of the SR&RL.

I've heard stories of other "track" and even "switches" over on the F&M in what was once a logging yard .

Of course these are nothing compared to the fantasies that sometimes pop up of someone throwing open a shed door and finding an intact Baldwin practically ready for steam, but is interesting to think how many overlooked scraps of the SR&RL may be left today.

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Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes Railroad / Re: Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Coat of Arms

« on: April 07, 2014, 01:51:10 PM »

Something's funky about that!

Shouldn't it be mirror imaged if it was intented for printing?