Railroad cancels holiday excursions in Unity

The Belfast & Moosehead Lake Railroad has canceled its holiday excursion service from its Unity depot and decided – after just one season – not to extend its lease on state-owned tracks between Hallowell and Richmond for 2003.

Callers to the railroad’s Unity telephone number are given a recorded message announcing that the carrier’s Thanksgiving and Christmas season excursion trains have been canceled. The message does not say why.

The railroad’s president, Bob Lamontagne, declined comment Tuesday night.

Starting last summer, the B&ML ran an excursion train along the Kennebec River that made stops in Hallowell, Gardiner and Richmond. Those municipalities built platforms at the stations, and the state reimbursed them for about two-thirds of their cost.

The service didn’t draw enough passengers to allow it to continue next summer, Lamontagne wrote in a letter to municipal officials there.

“This is due primarily to inadequate passenger numbers, which is a result of many contributing factors,” Lamontagne wrote.

“We continue to feel as we did in the beginning that this area has great potential, however, it is not financially feasible for the Belfast & Moosehead Lake Railroad to continue with this project.”

The city of Belfast chartered the railroad in 1867 and owned it for much of its history. But it lost its major freight customers when that city’s poultry industry collapsed in the mid-1980s and the city sold its stock to a private group. Eventually, one of those investors, the late Unity businessman Bert Clifford, obtained sole control.

The B&ML has focused on excursion traffic, with emphasis on passenger activity in Unity.

That irked Belfast leaders, who arranged for a $250,000 parking lot near their waterfront. By 2000, they had forced the railroad to give up use of a large portion of Belfast waterfront and ordered the railroad to remove some of its tracks.

Some officials in the Kennebec River area hope the railroad will revise its decision about excursions next year.

“I think the decision not to renew service is premature,” said Chris Paszyc, economic and community development director for Gardiner. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s not dead. There has been too much time and money invested in this just to have it go away after one season.”

Richmond Town Manager John “Jay” Robbins Jr. agreed with Paszyc that the new rail service, and the marketing for it, began too late last summer. They believe the service needs more time to prove itself.

“The people I’ve talked to enjoyed the rides. But I don’t think they had the numbers they needed. It may just be a matter of cash flow for the railroad. It’s a plan, with a little more time, that could have succeeded for them,” Robbins said.

The demise of the rail service is not indicative of how passenger service will fare in the state overall, according to Ronald Roy, director of passenger transportation for the state Department of Transportation.

The service would have benefited from a connection to other active rail lines, Roy said.

Plans to extend passenger service from Portland to Brunswick and Rockland will make service to Augusta more feasible, he said.

The Transportation Department will put out a request for proposals to run the excursion service soon, Roy said.