A generation of Mainers loved John Gould’s classic story, “The Fastest Hound Dog In The State of Maine,” about a dog that outraced Bangor and Aroostook Railroad trains up and down The Real Maine.

Now along comes Bob Tuthill of Brooks who sends word of a riderless snowmobile that tried the same trick with a B&A train, and lost. “It’s a tale right up your alley, Old Dawg,” promised Tuthill in a note earlier this week. And indeed, it is.

Tuthill heard the first-person account at Belfast from a friend who, with her husband, is a serious snowmobiler. It happened to the lady at Oakfield while the couple was on a snowmobile excursion from their southern Aroostook County camp. Tuthill’s retelling of the story:

“On March 7 the couple set out for a ride up a trail on separate sleds, her machine having just come out of the repair shop. About 10 miles out, they came to a railroad crossing, he crossing first and going out of her sight.

“One of her sled skis caught a rail and she was thrown into the willy-wags, with just her pride damaged. Her sled being 43 inches wide and the railroad tracks being 56 and one-half inches apart, the sled headed down the track with her in hot pursuit.

“She didn’t catch it, and it disappeared around a curve not far away. And then – you guessed it — soon came the `toot-toot’ of a train, headed for said sled somewhere up ahead. She tried to flag down the train, but the crew just looked at her and waved back, no doubt wondering why in hell this friendly lady with a helmet on her head was wandering around in the middle of nowhere.

“In the meantime, husband came back looking for wife. When he found her they went up the railroad track in search of train and sled. In time, the train crew noticed that the shadow of the locomotive on the snow beside the track didn’t look quite right, so they stopped and discovered a badly crunched snowmobile under the `cow catcher.’ Their first thought was, `My God. We’ve killed somebody.’ Soon, the sled owner and her husband arrived on the scene to assure them that there had been no one aboard the sled when it was struck.

“The crew backed up the train and removed the snowsled, which, of course, was totaled and now a matter for the insurance company to consider. `Believe me, March 7, 2001 is a date that will live in my mind forever,’ the lady told me.”

Although Tuthill did not identify the woman, he mentioned her place of employment. And so, having nothing better to do than play detective, I drove to Belfast to track her down and get verification of the story “in her own words,” as NBC’s Tom Brokaw is fond of saying in introducing a first-person account of some story on the six o’clock news.

But no such luck. Wednesday was her day off, wouldn’t you just know it, and her home telephone number is unlisted. However, we private investigators and highly trained observers are nothing if not tenacious. And so it was that eventually we talked and she willingly spilled the remainder of the beans about her memorable experience.

When her Arctic Cat struck the railroad track, throwing her off, the handlebars twisted around and snagged the throttle, sending the sled down the track, she explained. How fast? “Faster than I can run, I’ll tell you that,” the veteran snowmobiler replied.

“When I got up off the ground I had expected to turn around and see my sled sitting there. But when I looked up and saw it speeding down the track I realized it was a lost cause, so I just started walking the track, imagining I would find it fetched up somewhere around the bend. And just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I heard the choo-choo train chugging along behind me, in the same direction the sled was headed,” she said.

What was she thinking at that precise instant? “You couldn’t print it in a family newspaper,” the lady assured me. When the guys on the relatively slow-moving Bangor and Aroostook train lumbered by she waved at them and pointed frantically down the track. They told her later they thought that she must have been signaling that her sled was stuck in the snow of the outback and she was walking to get help. Being gregarious County boys brought up to believe that one friendly wave deserves another, they did what comes naturally. They waved back.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.