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| WW&F trestle in the late 1930's, the 1970's, and 1998. Upper picture from the E. Sproul collection, middle picture courtesy of Marcel Levesque. |
From the very beginning, Wiscasset was destined to be the southern terminus of whatever railroad eventually emerged from the discussions and wheelings & dealings of financiers. Wiscasset has a natural deep water port, pretty much sheltered from the Atlantic's fury and winter ice because it is several miles upriver. From there, promoters looked north to Quebec, so they could service that province when its ports were ice-locked. The paths the railroad was to take varied greatly, but most began at Wiscasset.
Wiscasset became the service center for the railroad. The machine shops were here, as was a diamond and transfer yard with the Maine Central. The railroad also did some shipping and receiving by ships. The town became best known for the long trestle the narrow gauge used to access various points along the harborside, as seen in the picture on the upper right, and also one of only two highway crossings on bridges in the state (the other is still over the Saco River, between Saco and Biddeford, by Guilford).
To this day evidence of the narrow gauge is still very much apparent, even if one doesn't know about it. Trestle piers stick up along the river almost the whole length of the town, even today. The ships Hesper and Luther Little, once proud wrecks and the drawing point of Wiscasset tourism (and now, as seen on the bottom right picture, disgraceful wrecks which were hauled away and buried in a landfill in May, 1998), were affiliated with the WW&F — owned by Frank Winter for the purpose of hauling coal and possibly lumber. To the right, you can see what the trestle, which serviced the dock and transfer yard, used to look like, in the 1930's after abandonment, and the remains of the trestle today. All pictures were taken from just off Route 1. The large building to the right of the upper pictures was the Turner Center Creamery, which was replaced in the early '90s by the town with a platform. The pier and dock beyond the ships serve a marina. You can barely make out Wiscasset's current railroad station in the bottom picture, beside the flagpole, serving the Maine Coast Railroad. This is the southern-most extent of the railroad.
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Wiscasset's railroad station was not always in this spot. The Maine Central and WW&F shared a station just south of the Upper Yard. Above, you can see the location where this station used to be. The spot is now dominated by Wiscasset's water treatment plant. The spit of land that extends left of Maine Coast rails is where the old station sat. The railroad continued north following the piers that can barely be seen off to the left. Interestingly enough, the diamond with the MEC was considered to be milepost 0.0, not the docks further south.
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| The Upper Yard in 1929. Structures left to right are the engine house, coal shed, and machine shops, to the right of the track. Photo by Linwood Moody, from the collection of Howard Kirkpatrick. |
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| The Upper Yard today, taken from about where the coaling track used to be. |
The last remaining part of this tour of Wiscasset is the Upper Yard, where the large machine shops and engine house was, and where the final scrapping of the railroad took place. Today, this area is home to the Wicasset Middle School, and a baseball field rests where the yard used to be, as you can see above. The turntable pit straddles the right field foul line, starting about where first base is. An exploration behind the fence yields a multitude of bent and twisted metal sticking out of the ground, and even the rusted remains of one of the engine's water tanks. From here, the road continued north, winding its way along the riverside until it crossed Rt. 218 at the head of the bay (see picture below).
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| The railroad's crossing of what is now Route 218 in 1934. Today, the point of view would be from the middle of the southbound lane of 218, with a power line pole sitting in the middle of the roadbed north of the bridge. Photo by Linwood Moody, from the collection of Howard Kirkpatrick. |
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Go back to the Wiscasset to Sheepscot Map (Map 1).
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