Re: SR&RL cabooses and trucks

It just doesn't look or sound right to me. Yes, it's fairly well known among Maine Two-Foot historians that the dismembered cupola end of 558 ended up in private hands in Morristown, NJ and is now apparently a garden shed in PA, but if the car had indeed spent an interim period in the 1950s on an amusement park railroad in upstate NY I think there would be some other evidence for it. (Railfans tend to be obsessive, and the disposition of surviving Maine Two-Foot rolling stock has been fairly well documented.) I think it's more likely that the owners of the amusement park just wanted a caboose for their two-foot gauge railroad and the SR&RL 556-558 series provided the inspiration for their replica (which is far from exact).

Very few SR&RL trucks or wheelsets remain that I know of. With the exception of the parlor car 'Rangeley', all the surviving SR&RL car bodies were de-trucked when the railroad was scrapped and so entered preservation sans trucks, and this would of course include the surviving cabooses (551, 553, 556, 557, and part of 558). I've been told that members of the SR&RL group in Phillips were able to dredge up some original wheelsets and possibly whole trucks from the bottom of Toothaker Pond at Madrid Station (apparently the remains of cars that flipped over at the Berlin Mills Co. sawmill log dump there), but the very idea that they had to resort to searching underwater should be evidence enough of how rare and otherwise unobtainable this material is. Still, SR&RL hardware does sometimes emerge in unexpected places. At the WW&F for example, one of the trucks under B&SR boxcar 67 has SR&RL-marked Griffin wheelsets which apparently came from Edaville, but whether they got there via the B&SR or separately is unknown.



As for SR&RL disconnect log bunks/"bob cars", that famous car type is extinct. The Phillips Historical Society's railroad room has a wooden bob-car extended drawbar or "stiff shackle" on display, but I don't think anything else survives. There are supposed to be original Portland Company drawings for the cars in the archives of the Maine Historical Society, so perhaps a replica could be built someday -- but that would require wheelsets.

-Philip Marshall