B&A ends its era after 111 years Railroad service had a rich history in the state

Friends and employees of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad Co. will gather for the last time at 2 p.m. today to mark the end of a business entity that provided transportation services for 111 years. Invited guests will meet at the general office building in Hermon, adjacent to the freight yard known to generations of railroad workers as Northern Maine Junction.

Train services on the routes leading north to Aroostook County and west to Quebec will continue, but under new management and a new corporate identity – Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway LLC. On Oct. 8, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Maine approved the sale of substantially all of the assets of Bangor and Aroostook to Rail World Inc., parent of the new operating company.

The storied B&A, a railroad that never actually reached Bangor with its own tracks, was the brainchild of a group of Houlton and Bangor businessmen led by Albert A. Burleigh. The company was incorporated on Feb. 13, 1891, for the purpose of building a standard gauge railroad from Brownville to Caribou, with branch lines from Dyer Brook Plantation to Ashland and from Easton to Fort Fairfield. The motivation for the planners was to open the first direct railroad from an American connection in Maine to Aroostook County.

B&A started by leasing – and later acquiring – the Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad Co., which had been operating since 1861 and ran a line from Old Town to Greenville and from Milo to Katahdin Iron Works. In 1892, scores of contractors began carving a right of way for the B&A through the Maine woods from Brownville in a northerly direction and from Houlton toward the south.

Construction of the new railroad’s tracks began on July 1, 1893, with the hiring of great numbers of immigrant laborers, mostly of Italian ancestry. Armed with pickaxes, shovels and wheelbarrows, their task was formidable as they cleared land and created a suitable surface for laying track into northern Maine, some parts of which were served only by wagon trails.

Records indicate that as the construction workers hacked their way through the forests, blasted hillsides and ledges with black powder, and filled swamps with wheelbarrows of gravel, they were assaulted throughout the summer by great swarms of mosquitoes and black flies. They lived in small, hastily built shacks or tents and ate whatever they could find along the way, including snakes and crows.

The flies had disappeared by the time the track-layers reached the Aroostook County line near Sherman and the leaves were falling as the crews hammered spikes through Island Falls. Snow came early that year but the workers pressed on, often long into the night when their workplace was illuminated by bonfires. The last 12 miles of rail from Ludlow to Houlton was placed atop the frozen ground and snow. On Dec. 16, 1893, the first train chugged into Houlton to a celebration marked by the singing of “Blessed be the Ties that Bind.”

During the next 20 years, B&A laid a network of tracks throughout Aroostook. The rails reached Caribou and Fort Fairfield in 1895, Patten and Ashland in 1896, Limestone in 1897 and Van Buren in 1899. The Fish River Railroad, which soon became a B&A branch, was constructed in 1902 through to Fort Kent by way of Portage. Service to other St. John Valley communities was planned but delayed for nearly a decade until the railroad could complete a vital link to the sea at its southern extremity.

Track was opened from South LaGrange to Searsport in 1905. In addition, an interchange and terminal yard was constructed at Northern Maine Junction and port facilities were installed, first at Cape Jellison and later at Searsport. For the rest of B&A’s years, the junction in Hermon served as an interchange point. Despite the company’s name, Bangor and Aroostook’s tracks never made it into Bangor. Though B&A trains did travel into Union Station in Bangor, they did so only under an agreement with Maine Central Railroad, which owned the rails in the Queen City.

Bangor and Aroostook also opened the so-called “Medford Cutoff” in 1907, to provide a low-gradient route for heavily laden southbound trains. The growing Great Northern Paper Co. opened a mill the same year in East Millinocket and B&A was there for the groundbreaking.

Turning its attention again to northern Maine, the railroad opened track from Fort Kent to St. Francis in 1909 to tap the riches of the vast northern forest. The company put down its so-called “River Road” along the St. John River from Van Buren to Fort Kent the following year, looking for revenue from the region’s potato farms and later from the paper mill complex in Madawaska. Another level-grade line was spiked in place in 1910 between Van Buren and Squa Pan and a connecting line was built between Mapleton and Presque Isle.

A proposed Allagash Line, perhaps Bangor and Aroostook’s boldest concept, never reached fruition. Suggested in 1907 as a route penetrating northwestern Maine, it would have extended from the main line at West Seboeis through the Jo-Mary Lakes region to Ripogenus Dam, on to Chamberlain Lake and along what is now the Allagash Wilderness Waterway to St. Francis.

Bangor and Aroostook completed its network in 1915 by bridging the St. John River in Van Buren to create a connection with the Canadian railways near St. Leonard, New Brunswick. The bridge became an important interchange for freight between Maine and Canada and points in the American Midwest.

As the freight business grew, B&A acquired an array of steam locomotives – some of which lasted until the diesel-electric era of the late 1940s. Potatoes instantly became an important commodity and the railroad adapted standard boxcars for the perishable product by lining the cars with sheathing paper and installing wood stoves in each. An attendant required to travel with a string of cars to tend the stoves became known fondly as the “potato bug.”

Later, the railroad invested in state-of-the-art refrigerator cars and at one time owned one of the largest fleets of such freight cars in the United States. The cars were used in Maine in the potato trade in winter and spring and leased to western interests for vegetable transport in the summer and fall.

B&A ran passenger trains on most of its lines in the beginning because Maine roads were really in rudimentary stages of development. Its main line trains – the Aroostook Flyer and the Potatoland Special – became American classics with their dining and sleeping cars. Both offered connections to East Coast cities without passengers having to disembark.

The original Bangor and Aroostook had its management headquarters at 84 Harlow St. in Bangor. Later, under the ownership of Amoskeag Corp., a holding company, its local executive offices were established at Northern Maine Junction. More recently, under the former ownership of Iron Road Railways, it acquired parts of the former Canadian Pacific line across Maine and northern New England, extending track-usage rights to Montreal.

Bangor and Aroostook’s zenith was from about 1935 to 1955 when the company carried the most passengers and freight in its history and experienced its best net income. A steady erosion of the railroad’s traffic soon followed with the incursion of the truck and automobile. The last passenger train was run on Oct. 4, 1961, and the potato business dwindled until it was gone. The completion of Interstate 95 to Houlton hastened the end of the railroad’s potato traffic.

In the 1980s, the railroad focused its attention on transporting wood chips, paper products, tree length logs and lumber from the Ashland branch and paper products from mills in Madawaska, Millinocket and East Millinocket.

Most recently, business continued to leak away and debts mounted under Iron Road’s ownership. The company was forced into bankruptcy late last year by three creditors owed more than $7 million. Losses were estimated at twice that amount by the time a bankruptcy agreement was struck last month.

Under the deal approved by a federal bankruptcy judge in October, the B&A system was not sold, but its assets were – more than 835 miles of track, facilities and real estate – to Rail World Inc. for $50 million. The deal should be formally completed in December, when the new owners plan to take over, rebuild the business, and change the rail system’s name to Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway.

Over the past 111 years, however, Bangor and Aroostook touched the lives of many Maine people. Stations were built in nearly every town on the rail network, providing local services – freight, passenger, express, telegraph and mail – and local employment. Sons followed fathers, and occasionally daughters followed mothers into the service of the railroad.

Even though Bangor and Aroostook did not have tracks in Bangor, that city, too, was an integral part of its system and a destination for passenger trains that came down from Aroostook at least twice a day for more than 60 years.

BANGOR DAILY NEWS FILE PHOTO

Bangor and Aroostook Railroad officials pose in front of two new 2,000 horsepower diesel locomotive units that were delivered in 1966. From the left are assistant diesel foreman Duane Howes, chief mechanical officer Vaughn Ladd, manager of operations Harold F. Duffy, and President W. Jerome Strout.