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Boston and Maine Forest, River and Mountain by Robert Willoughby Jones w/ DJ
Boston and Maine Forest, River and Mountain by Robert Willoughby Jones
Hard Cover w/ dust jacket
224 pages
Copyright 2000
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements and Introduction 8
Prologue by Jim Shaughnessy 12
VI FOREST: New Hampshire Main Line 17
"Passenger Job to Wilmington" by Ralph E. Fisher
"Selling for the Railroad" by Dwight A. Smith
"Concord Interlude" Photography by Carl T. Smith
"New Hampshire Division Engineer" by Everett E. Howland
VII NORTH COUNTRY 57
Conway Branch
Mt. Washington Cog Railway
Concord to Woodsville
"Night of Camp Trains" by James H. Duncan
VIII RIVER: Connecticut River Line 85
"Working the River" by Donald S. Robinson
Concord & Claremont Branch
Claremont & Concord Railroad
"We Ran Excursions" by H. Arnold Wilder
"Accounting for the B&M" by Edward T. Levay
"How McGinnis Got the B&M" by Edward T. Levay
"Controlling the Conn River" by Francis Audette
IX MOUNTAIN: Fitchburg Division 123
"Riding Henry Thoreau's Railroad" by Marshall Brooks
Central Mass. Branch
Peterboro Branch
"Country Train" by Lawrence Feid
"Firing the Blueberry Special" by Donald F. Williams
"Stony Brook Caretaker" by H. Bentley Crouch
"Railroad Time Service" by Kent Singer and Edward Ueberall
"Inspector Kieran of the B&M" by W. A. Wheeler
"Operating Under Difficulties" by John E. Buck
"Riding Out to Troy" by Donald S. Robinson
"West End Conductor" by Fred Miller
"Merchandise Limited" by The Chief Epilogue by John C. Burke 208
Appendices 212
Bibliography and Index 222
INTRODUCTION
The act of creating this book has caused me, again and again, to reflect with awe and nostalgia at what an organization like the Boston and Maine could
once accomplish at its zenith as an important New England business. Most striking to me is the size of its labor force, the single-most important reason the railroad could do so much.
Consider the Titanic disaster on April 15, 1912. To assist the ship's survivors then expected in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the B&M put in motion a plan to send five 12-car trains of coaches and sleepers, virtually on a moment's notice. Indeed the first train was on its journey out of Boston when the world learned just how bad the tragedy was and how few survivors there would be, and the train was recalled.
Or consider the annual summer movement of camp trains into New England on the B&M. Such activity could last a week and involve hundreds of Pullman cars assembled from railroads near and far. What happened to such business? Surely it wasn't lost because kids stopped going to camps. No, the heavyweight Pullman pool was wearing out quickly in the late 1950s, and the McGinnis regime at the B&M had paired back the operation so drastically that the railroad could no longer muster either the equipment or the manpower to get the job done. By 1960 both the B&M and the Maine Central were essentially done with long-distance passenger trains and the infrastructure that supported them.
Think about mail trains, express trains, paper trains. These had to have full crews to handle all those goods; the mail trains had post-office crews. And the stations where they called had to have staff to receive the shipments. There were switchmen in the yards, tenders at the crossings, men in the towers, and men in the cabooses when there were cabooses.
During the Second World War, the B&M moved massive tonnage across its territory, as did every other U. S. railroad. Indeed, Americans responded with a tenacity and dedication to the cause that is not only no longer possible, but isn't even very well remembered today. What about it that I find so enviable, so efficient, so wonderful even, is that the mechanism was in place such that such results could be achieved. And by mechanism I mean people: skilled people trained to carry out their jobs as part of a larger whole. Railroads do not have enough of them today.
Though I acknowledge the great strides of technology in making life in the year 2000 more advanced than ever and with many creature comforts-the computer on which I type these words being one-I say we should consider what from the past has worked well and what we ought to preserve.
It makes me proud to see what a great resurgence that commuting by rail has experienced in this country in the last two decades, both in conventional rail and in so-called light rail. And I am thrilled to see the strides made by the freight railroads in growing their business and making significant investment in track and rolling stock. This summer I enjoyed a sojourn in western Massachusetts where I was dazzled by the amount of rail freight traffic on the CSX's Boston & Albany at Richmond and observed with pleasure at Shelburne Falls the burgeoning business on the former B&M Fitchburg Division.
Passenger rail advocates are great rumor mongers, even more so than the old-guy "juice" fans of the traction world, and they will grasp at any straw, no matter how reedy or short, when there is some word about a line being extended or new service created. That said, even though I consider myself to be a skeptic and a realist, my heart's cockles are warmed mightily by the shop talk in New England this summer as I have put ear to rail.
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