Re: Maine in October

You're much more of an expert at these things than I am. All I can express is the views of a midwesterner transplanted to western Mass. for seven years.

I made several trips up to Wiscasset to help shovel ballast rock. You might remember me as the guy who forgot his work boots the first time and showed up wearing tennis shoes, to the horror of several. During my time there, tampering went from hand-held devices to several iterations towards the magical device now used. Yes, shoveling was work, but I learned about the traditional ways of laying track, and I found the people there were fun to work with.

Thus, when my family decided to go up to Maine to ride a whale-watching boat (we did that three times and never did see a whale, but we had a good time despite that), it was natural for us to go by Wiscasset. The whale-watching boat left from Boothbay Harbor, so we went by the Boothbay village also and rode their train. Other touristing took us to Portland, but the train trip run by the museum didn't look very interesting to any of us, so we skipped it.

I added Phillips to our itinerary when we planned a trip to Augusta; of those four 2-foot experiences, this was the only one which was "forced" into our schedule. However, once we actually got there, We found the trip through the woods from the SR&RL station on the road to their yard in the woods to be the most interesting/genuine 2-foot experience of the four, and their collection of equipment was probably also the best. The people there were very nice, but I had to tell them quite frankly that I would have preferred that they use one of their genuine internal-combustion locomotives than their pretend steam locomotive, but that is just me (run-of-the-mill tourists may not have even noticed). Thus, when I recommend a stop at Phillips, it is partly because those brave folk really do need help, but it is mainly because they have have some really neat stuff there to see.

As I wrote that last paragraph, I realized that in my mind I group SR&RL, EBT, and CATS - real gems with financial issues, partly because they don't have quite the exposure to tourist traffic that similar operations have.