ALNA – Harry Percival, who led efforts to restore a historic narrow-gauge rail line in central Maine, died Saturday after seeing his dream turn to reality.

Percival, who was 71, suffered from cancer aggravated by asbestosis.

He had spent 16 years restoring a 1.25-mile stretch of the original 44-mile Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway, a distinctive 2-foot-wide track that carries small trains at 25 mph. The train seats just 35, with a single column of chairs on both sides of the aisle.

Narrow-gauge trains connected Alna with larger railroads across the state until they stopped running in 1933.

Even though the trains were gone, Percival became enchanted with the idea of restoring the railroad as he grew up near the line in the small town of Weeks Mills.

About the time he started school, the rails were ripped up for scrap. When Percival was 9 he set out to rebuild them.

“He took some of his father’s 6-by-6 timbers and was going to use them as ties,” Clarissa, his widow, said. “When his father discovered the boards were missing, that job ceased.”

But the dream remained alive through the years as Percival studied electrical engineering, helped build destroyers at Bath Iron Works and served in the Army in postwar Europe.

He returned home, married and raised three children while working for an electric company. When Percival built a house for his family in 1974 in Somerville, a town 30 miles north of Wiscasset, he designed the entire downstairs as a train shed, complete with an 8-foot-deep grease pit under the floorboards.

His goal was to salvage engine No. 9, the only remaining locomotive from the railroad and the oldest narrow-gauge engine in the country.

The engine, owned by Alice Ramsdell, whose father was the last man to own the railroad, was stored in a barn on a farm in West Thompson, Conn.

“I can remember the first trip I took down when I was about 4 or 5,” said Percival’s youngest son, Chris Percival, 31, of Waldoboro. “You walk into this vast, dark barn and expect to see cows and pigs and here’s this hulking steam engine.”

Once Ramsdell was convinced the engine would be properly restored, she agreed to sell it. In 1985, Percival bought all the land that was left of the original railroad for roughly $8,000. He surveyed the overgrown property and then built a train shed.

The project gained momentum as friends and neighbors offered their help and train enthusiasts chipped in. About a decade ago, Percival started a railroad association, which has grown to 750 members from as far away as Germany and England.

The operation itself is now run as a museum by a board of directors. Plans are on to lay more track this spring.

“It really is an incredible story,” said Larson Powell of Lenox, Mass., head of the new railroad association’s board. “To think this guy was up there, all by himself, starting this. Everyone thought he was nuts, but he stuck with it.”

WW&F trains run on weekends in the summer, and only on Saturdays during the winter.