Radio Script #12
Little Talks On Common Things
January 30, 1949
How many of you remember Maine’s narrow-gauge railroads? How many of you ever rode on them? The one nearest Waterville was still running only a few years ago. It started ambitiously as the Wiscasset and Quebec Railroad, then became the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington. On paper it was the first of the old two-footers because it got its charter in 1854. It was forty years later, however, that the narrow, little two-foot track was laid down.
In my student days at Colby College the embankment on the Winslow side, where the surveyors had intended to bridge the Kennebec on the way to Farmington was still standing, but the road itself then ran, as it did for twenty years more, from Wiscasset to Albion. Some local listener can tell me when that part of the line which ran into Winslow was abandoned.
That old narrow gauge road started off with lofty ambitions. It was going right through to the Province of Quebec, have deluxe trains with diners, sleepers and parlor cars. Its promoters were going to take the million dollar annual
grain traffic away from the Grand Trunk. Wiscasset had a fine harbor and is a little nearer Liverpool than is Portland.
From its first days the little railroad ran into trouble. Its first stretch was planned to Burnham, 55 miles up state from Wiscasset. But the big Maine Central would not let the little fellow cross its Belfast branch. So it was decided to swing west at Weeks Mills and send the line to Waterville and Farmington,hoping to make some kind of deal to use the Sandy River rails from there to Rangeley, when go on to Quebec. But the Maine Central again boxed the little fellow Sears. They couldn’t cross Maine Central tracks at Farmington to connect with the Sandy River. By this time folks had a new name for the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington. Its WWF now stood for Weak, Weary and Feeble.
Nevertheless it was quite a road in its day, and for many years it served well the towns between Wiscasset and Albion. My last ride on it was in 1921, When I was trying to interest the school superintendent at Weeks Mills in a line of text books I was then selling.
It was not the WWF, however, but another narrow gauge road that was the pride of my own boyhood, because I was born and reared in a narrow guage town. It was the Bridgton and Saco River Road, originally only sixteen miles long, connecting the town of Bridgton, with its three big woolen mills, with the Mountain Division of the Maine central at Bridgton Junction in the town of Hiram.
Later the road was extended six miles up Long Lake to Harrison. George Ham, the engineer of the tiny little locomotive and Phil Marcou, the conductor, were my boyhood heroes. The last ride I had in the little passenger car, with its single-passenger seats, was in 1916, but my first ride on it is more memorable. I was only five years old, and was making my first trip to Portland with my parents. Even then, though the big, broad-gauge Maine Central was more impressive, the tiny engine and cars of that two-foot road were more intimate and more assuredly mine.
Somewhere around the house I have some snapshots taken of a wreck on that old Bridgton and Saco, the only train wreck, I am thankful to say, in which I was ever involved. No one was hurt, but the passengers had to walk the track two miles into Bridgton Junction.
The schedules all called for mixed trains; so the baggage and passenger cars were always preceded by several freight cars. The first mile out of Bridgton Junction was all up grade, and if the freight cars were many or carried unusually heavy loads, the train frequently had to make several attempts to reach the summit. It would start nobly out of the Junction, puff more and more slowly until it came to a stop with spinning wheels striking sparks from the rails.
Then it would back down to the Junction and try again. Believe it or not, Mr. Ripley, I remember one spring day when all of us passengers alighted on the train’s first unsuccessful try, walked up to the summit, and picked mayflowers until the train made the grade. Then, with all cars over the crest and ready for the long, level run to North Sebago, the obliging conductor stopped and let us on.
There are said to have been ten of these old two-foot roads in Maine. I cannot identify all of them; it will take some old-time railroad man to do that. But I have good reason to recall the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Road. In 1922 I spent seven hours stalled in one of its trains between Strong and Kingfield in a howling blizzard. It was near the old Dead River Station, a few miles south of Rangeley that, on another occasion, I saw my first beaver cuttings.
One of the experiences I missed was a ride in the Sandy River’s palatial parlor car, which used to accommodate summer guests bound for the swanky Hotel Rangeley. My seat was always in the plebeian coach with the other traveling salesmen.
Having taken a crack at the WWF by referring to it as the Weak, Weary and Feeble, I must tell you what they called my old road, the Bridgton and Saco River. In its last days it was known as the Busted and Still Running. The Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes was the Shaky, Rough and Ready Loafer.
Many people remember the old slate road, the two-footer from Monson Junction to the slate quarries at Monson. Then there was the Kennebec Central from Gardiner to Togus. That makes five of the old narrow guage roads: the WWF, the B & SR, the SR & RL, the Monson and the Kennebec Central. Where were the five others? Come on, you old railroaders, let us know.
It is very gratifying to some of us that not only the rider of these old roads, but some of their actual rolling stock is still operating today. Did you ever hear of the Edaville Railroad, operated by Ellis D.Atwood through his cranberry bogs on Cape Cod. Mr. Atwood’s Edaville in the town of Carver is the biggest privately owned cranberry business in the world. It produces over 10,000 barrels of cranberries a year. Mt. Atwood decided he wanted a railroad. So he bought same of the discarded rolling stock of the Bridgton and Saco River line. From various sources he got parts for S! miles of track. One of his engines was the old B & SR No.7, behind which I had ridden many a bouncing mile. His deluxe coach is the once palatial parlor car of the old Rangeley line. B & SR’ s best known passenger coach, the pondicherry, now rides Mr. Atwood’s rails.
Thus down on Cape Cod is a sort of reconstruction of several of the old narrow gauge roads of Maine. If you go down on the Cape in the summer months you can ride the S! mile loop of Mr. Atwood’s road for a dime. Thousands of tourists take the trip every summer, but the little road is no mere pleasure toy. It hauls the cranberries and their pickers, and it hauls the many tons of sand with which the bogs must be sprinkled every winter to combat weeds and bugs and to radiate the heat that prevents the vines from freezing.
Mr. Atwood’s road is about the size of the old Monson line, which they used to call the Two by Six two feet wide and six miles long. It isn’ t so long nor so important a road as my old B & SR. But naturally any man of my age who chanced to be born in Wiscasset or Rangeley, in Monson or Bridgton, gets a thrill from seeing a modern railroad on Cape Cod using the same engines and cars that stocked the trains we used to ride on many years ago.
Same of the finest citizens of Central Maine claim Scotland as the land of their birth, or at least the land of their parents. This week allover the world Scotsmen are singing Auld Lang Syne with exceptional vigor as they honor that best loved of Scotsmen, Robert Burns. It was more than thirty years ago that one of Waterville’s leading Scots called me to task for saying Bobbie Burns. No true Scot says that. It is Robbie Burns, or in better Scotch, Rabbie Burns.
Most of the Scotch people in America have been moderately well-to-do. Some of them, like Andrew Carnegie, became very wealthy. But today, as in Burns’ time, much of Scotland is a land of poor farmers. It was Burns, above all poets, who sang the “short and simple annals of the poor” • Readers who misunderstand him think he praised poverty as a virtue. Not so! He praised rather the poverty- stricken people who lived such noble, honest lives with no hope of getting out of their stricken condition.
Burns, in his love of liquor and his amours, was scarcely a model for living. A fellow Scotsman, who perhaps understood Burns better than did his official biographer Lockhart, was Thomas Carlyle. In his masterly “Essay on Burns”, Carlyle says of the poet’s dissipated life and early death: “Had he been richer, never so little richer, the whole might have issued otherwise.” It was hopeless, enervating poverty that doomed Burns.
We folk who do not have the advantage of being Scotch can hardly view their national poet through the loving eyes of those who knew at first hand the banks and braes of Bonnie Doon. But we can appreciate the simple sincerity of good poetry when we read it. And above all things else, Burns was utterly sincere. So on this broadcast, devoted to Common Things, we are glad to pay honor to the man who wrote the best that has ever been written about the commonest things of life. Just consider some of his titles: “To a Mouse”, “To a Mountain Daisy”, “To a Louse on a Lady’s Bonnet in Church”.
The world of letters will always proclaim the virtues of “Tam 0′ Shanter” and “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”, but we take sides with those Scotsmen -among them the great Carlyle — who say that Burns ought best to be remembered for his songs. “They do not need to be set to music”, said Carlyle. “In themselves they are music”.
Of course the best known of his songs is “Auld Lang Syne”. Almost as well known are “My Bonnie Mary”, “Green Grow the Rashes 0”, and “John Anderson, My Jo”. But what are to me the most purely musical verses that Burns ever wrote I want to share with you tonight. He calls this song “The Banks of Devon’.
Listen!
“How pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon,
With green spreading bushes and flow’rs blooming fair.
But the bonniest flow’ r on the banks of the Devon
Was once a sweet bud on the braes of the Ayr.
Mild be the sun on this sweet blushing flower,
In the gay rosy morn, as it bathes in the dew;
And gentle the fall of the soft vernal Shower
That steals on the evening each leaf to renew.
o spare the dear blossom, ye orient breezes,
With chill hoary wing as ye usher the dawn;
And far be thou distant, thou reptile that seizes
The verdure and pride of the garden or lawn.
Let Bourbon exult in his gay gilded lilies,
And England triumphant display her proud rose;
A fairer than either adorns the green valleys
Where Devon, sweet Devon, meandering flows.”
A few weeks ago we referred to some of that weirdly twisted language known as Federal Prose — the language of government agencies in their tortuous directives that conceal rather than reveal the meaning. What do you make of this one? “Undue multiplicity of personnel assigned either concurrently or consecutively to a single function involves deterioration of quality in the resultant product as compared with the product of the labor of an exact sufficiency of personnel.”
It might take you a long time to figure out that what the writer of Federal prose is trying to say is the old adage “Too many cooks spoil the broth”.
Year: 1949