INTRODUCTION
I don’t like this—prefatory pages in books. Why can’t we speak our piece in the main text without expecting a feller to wade through Forewords, Prefaces, and Prologues? We can, if our gray-matter is agile enough.
But—myIntroduction!
The world’s railroads aren’t all the same, you know. Width of track, orgauge, varies. Standard gauge, as 'most everyone knows, is four-feet, eight-and-one-half inches between the rails and there are plenty of hypotheses about how it got that way.
A few roads are wider than standard—five-feet, and five-and-a-half. Years ago you could even go all the way from New York to Chicago on tracks six feet wide. England once made merry on somesevenfoot gauge.
Narrower gauge was much more common. Three feet and three-and-a-half once claimed thousands of miles. Why! In Grandpa’s day there were no less than thirty-seven different gauges of track in our fair land, and Lord only knows how many the foreign countries had, with their millimeters and other measuring sticks. Today, in North America, the four-feet, eight-and-a-half-inchers have pretty well switched the non-standard lines off the railroad map.
Of our own 227,000 miles of line 99-1/2 per cent is standard gauge, a scant 932 being something else—724 of it the Colorado three-footers. On only 380 miles is there a semblance of passenger service! Of Canada’s 42,000 miles, 90 is narrow gauge—the three-foot White Pass & Yukon Route. Mexico, however, hangs onto her slim gauge a little better and 2,400 of her total 12,600 miles of road is three-feet wide. The 809 mile Newfoundland Railway, three-and-a-half feet narrow, is likewise prosperously content with its non-conformity.
Of the whole world’s railway mileage, 788,000—but let’s not get too involved here. Anyway, foreign lands still consider economical transportation more important than the distance between the rails,and many miles of narrow tracks still thread hill and dale beyond the seas.
The very narrowest of them all, excepting some industrial tramway or miniature freak, was the vaunted two-footer. Sixty-centimeter, they call ’em over there, which is just another way of saying twenty-three and five-eighths inches. England had a few, and France has her famous “decaville” railways. The far East, Africa, and Australia still run generous two-foot mileage, and Latin America is pretty fond of the little cusses.
Up here in our country, half a century ago, they blossomed like roses at sunrise, bloomed lustily through the morning, but wilted ere there’d been time for the winds of Fate to blow their pollen around in good shape.
The top-puff midgets were the stout little virtuosi up in Maine. Their bantam chests jingled merrily with medals they’d won. A few scattered hybrids did some anemic bush-pushing elsewhere—one in Pennsylvania, one in New Mexico, and a third in Colorado’s icy mountains. They weren’trealrailroads, though. Either industrial outfits or kind of street-carrish affairs. That’s why I skipped ’em here. Had to draw the line somewhere.
The ten two-footers in Maine boasted about 212 miles of line. They were built and run like the big railroads. Had freight, and passenger trains. Were governed by the same laws and regulations. And were immensely vital to the loves and lives of the neighborhood. Their smoky smells were just as alluring and they could holler just as loud. I always thought they were a bit more democratic and hail-fellow-well-met than the more decorous grownups. Colorful, and kind of dramatic, too!
They passed, not because folks wanted all railroads alike. Not because they didn’t measure up. Worse than that. They limped into the sunset because people didn’t use them any more. Theirgaugemade no difference. Plenty of standard gauges puffed into the limbo too. Neither could run without money. The two-footers stood it longer than their more expensive relatives of wider size. No. Their narrow gauge wasn’t the reason although the standardization tycoons beefed about non-conformity and the cost of transferring freight.
The decade of the 1930’s saw them go. For a while longer the Bridgton line and the little Monson were tolerated by some and cherished by a few, but when clouds of Peace darkened the war-red sky they were gone—the last two-footer had whistled off leaving only memory-trains to scoot through the mid-regions of the past.
That’s why the Edaville Railroad stands out. Why it’s a splendid anti-climax to an era of colorful midget railroading. Not so much because it’s the last survivor, as I persist in calling it, as a resurrection—an ideal risen from the ashes of Yesterday.
Here it is: not a synthetical reproduction but those very same engines and cars that made railroad history for three generations, alive and puffing again on Ellis Atwood’s eighteen-hundred acres. A seed from history that now blooms with the cranberries, sprouting in that same sand that perennializes faded shrubs from the Holy Commonwealth, Plymouth Colony, America in the making.
That’s why I had to have anIntroduction. All right?