Back on Track

In lieu of a full-blown smile, Harry Percival will look at you and squint his eyes, almost questioningly. That means his heart is warming to a favorite pastime—talking about his dream of refurbishing the old Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington railroad.

“When I first started working on this all alone, people would go by—‘What’s that fool think he’s gonna do anyway?’” says Percival, 70, project founder. “You’ve got to get something far enough along before people begin to take you seriously.”

Seriously is what people now take the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway Museum at Sheepscot Station, just outside Alna, Maine (pop. 675). “Far enough along” includes a worldwide membership base of more than 700 (from as far away as England and Germany), a rock-solid core of zealous volunteers, almost a mile of track laid, and another mile of roadbed cleared along the line of the old WW&F.

That sharply contrasts the picture that Larson Powell, current WW&F board of directors president, saw when he hopped aboard as the last charter member of the massive restoration project in 1991.

“When I first came up here, there was nothing except a couple of rails in the ground and some cement ties that Harry had been working on pretty much by himself,” says Powell, 69, a retired investment adviser and financial publisher. “Little by little, people started coming in. It’s all actually happened very, very fast.”

With the addition of Zack Wyllie, 58, a local plumber who is the WW&F Railway Museum’s vice president and superintendent of the railroad, the renovation pace quickened considerably. The first bay of a three-bay engine house, tailored after the line’s original engine house in Wiscasset, was completed before tackling the resuscitation of the old WW&F’s last remaining flatcar.

“By the time Harry bought that flatcar,” recalls Powell, “the wood had all completely decomposed. It was all just metal parts.”

After the flatcar was restored, the engine house’s other two bays were finished. Today, Percival’s living dream includes two steam locomotives—No. 9 (leased) and No. 10; the original Wiscasset and Quebec passenger coach No. 3 (also leased); a caboose built from the original design plans drawn up exactly 100 years ago; and a boxcar that came from the same source as the flatcar and Engine No. 9—a barn in West Thompson, Conn. All three had been housed there since 1937.

Procuring the boxcar and the prized Engine No. 9, the oldest known two-foot gauge steam locomotive engine in the country, is a lengthy story of persevering courtship, but one that never fails to make Percival beam at his own patience and persistence.

The project’s ambitious roadbed-clearing and track-laying team is headed by Wyllie. “He and Fred Morse and several other guys come up on weekends all winter long. They’re the real crazies,” marvels Powell. “In the freezing cold, they’re out there cutting trees.”

The real deal

An infectious glow exudes from this group of comrades whose collective passion ignites the fire behind the formidable restoration of the WW&F: Percival’s squint, Powell’s eloquence, and the homespun matter-of-factness of Wyllie and Morse all convey a youthful enthusiasm that belies their years. But when it comes to true youth, that too is excellently served.

The entire core group speaks with awe of key volunteer Jason Lamontagne, 22, a recent University of Maine graduate.

“He started coming over here when he was 14 years old by bicycle,” Powell says. “He lives in Bowdoinham (about 25 miles away). One Saturday, his bike gave out and he wound up walking all the way. He’s here every weekend working on Engine No. 10. He’s even re-created rule books about every procedure that should be followed.”

Adds Morse: “When he was 16, he could look at a photo of a steam locomotive and tell you the year it was built, just like some people can with automobiles. Throughout his college days, he’d drive the hour and a half down from Orono on a Friday afternoon and not leave until Sunday night or early Monday morning. His whole life has been down here for the past seven years.”

Powell shakes his head in admiration. “The thing that’s so interesting is that some of the younger guys are the most fanatical about keeping this authentic,” he says. “They don’t want this to look like some amusement park, they want it to look like the railroad did in 1930.”

James Patten, 29, a computer programmer by trade who constructed the WW&F Railway Museum website, also shares that vision. “My goal is to make this place as authentic as it can get,” says Patten. “It’s a museum, so you should act like you’re running it the way they once did. This railroad was a working railroad. It’s not like somebody’s backyard railroad; this railroad actually did some work.”

Indeed, the old Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington railroad, in addition to hauling milk, apples, timber, and other freight, also carried schoolchildren—a virtual school bus on rails. Though he never rode the actual WW&F in its heyday, Percival, in high school, would take a mail “stage” train down to Wiscasset, before boarding the Maine Central to Newcastle.

“A six-mile ride for 14 cents,” he chuckles. “That was back in the ’40s. Of course, 14 cents didn’t come easily then.”

Slow but steady

The WW&F covered a 44-mile stretch from Albion to Winslow, and was one of five 2-foot gauge railroads that operated in Maine from 1879 to 1944. Two-foot gauge rail is spread only 2 feet apart, as opposed to the standard-gauge rail width of 4 feet, 8.5 inches.

Two-foot gauge rails were lighter, the engines smaller, and everything from building the roadbed to the equipment itself was cheaper than standard gauge.

But on June 15, 1933, at 7:33 a.m., the original WW&F came to a sudden and harrowing end, when the train, powered by Engine No. 8, was derailed coming out of Albion. The company that owned the line at the time left the wreck right where it was. No scheduled service ever ran again.

Percival remembers a day in 1943 when his father took him up to view the site of the old wreck.

“The only thing that was left was the cowcatcher (the pointed ‘pilot’ at the low front of the engine),” he says. “My father helped me drag it up from the riverbank. We set it on the ties of the old track and left it there because it wasn’t ours.Somebody lugged it off.”

Today, in a miraculous full-cycle turn of fate, that pilot is one of the venerable artifacts lodged in the WW&F museum, which occupies the rebuilt station house alongside the head of track at Sheepscot Station. “As we get bigger and a bit more well-known, that stuff starts to appear,” comments Wyllie on the resurfacing of the relic 67 years later.

The museum’s immediate goal lies just a mile away—Alna Center, the next station stop up the line from Sheepscot. Wyllie and his crew have cleared about 1,200 feet of original roadbed beyond it, and this summer the project gets a major manual labor boost from a surprise source: the U.S. Marines, who will help rebuild the Humason Brook trestle as part of a training exercise.

When Alna Center is reached, the total round trip (with a conductor handing tickets out) will be a little more than two miles. The completion date is projected for sometime in 2003.

Meanwhile, the tree-by-tree, tie-by-tie, rail-by-rail pace steadily continues. “With 12 people you can unload the flatcar in about 25 minutes,” Morse says. “With two people, you can unload a flatcar in about four hours,” quips Patten in reply.

So the WW&F gang leans on a cherished memory as soothing liniment through their endless travails: a night in February 1995, when Engine No. 9 finally was delivered by flatbed trailer to Sheepscot Station from its 58-year entombment in a musty Connecticut barn.

“Harry had wanted to get that engine up here for so long, and when it rolled down onto the track, all of us were practically in tears,” recalls Powell. “Clarissa, Harry’s wife, was standing next to me. She said, ‘This just shows you that crazy dreams sometimes come true.’”

Author/writer Alan Ross is West region editor for American Profile.

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