IMAGES OF RAIL: MAINE NARROW GAUGE RAILROADS, by Robert L. MacDonald, Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, S.C., 2003, 128 pages, paperback, $19.99.

Narrow-gauge railroads are much more human in scale than standard-gauge railways. They are kid-sized in comparison to the standard-gauge trains that still rumble through Maine carrying logs, lumber, chemicals, freight and passengers. A child can hop into a narrow-gauge engine and feel like a full-grown engineer at the throttle. But their size belies their rugged origins.

There used to be a number of narrow-gauge railroads running through some of Maine’s more broken and hilly terrain, such as the Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes Railroad, the Bridgton & Saco River Railroad, and the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway. They were built in areas that standard-gauge railroad lines had bypassed, hauling timber and slate out of mountainous regions or districts riddled by lakes.

Some carried passengers to remote vacation spots. In 1901, the Sandy River RR rolled out the first narrow-gauge parlor car in the United States. With its 10 green mohair-upholstered swivel seats, the car “enabled Boston and New York nabobs to travel first-class all the way” to the Rangeley lakes, Robert L. MacDonald writes in his new book “Images of Rail: Maine Narrow Gauge Railroads.”

MacDonald uses his extensive collection of photographs as the roadbed to lay out the history of the narrow-gauge railroads in Maine, from their start in the late 1870s to their demise in 1930s and ’40s to their revival as tourist attractions in the ’90s. MacDonald knows both trains and Maine. He worked in the state for 35 years in the traffic department of the Canadian National-Grand Trunk Railway System. He became a narrow-gauge rail fan after a ride near Bridgton more than 60 years ago.

A standard-gauge railroad in the United States, Canada and Great Britain is 4 feet 81/2 inches wide between the tracks. Narrow-gauge railways are either 2 feet or 3 feet wide. Maine narrow-gauge lines were 2-footers.

The first narrow-gauge railroad in the world was a 2-foot gauge line built in 1832 from slate quarries in mountainous northwestern Wales down to the sea. The narrow-gauge track provided greater flexibility than standard gauge in the rough Welsh terrain.

George E. Mansfield of Massachusetts was the one who saw the potential for narrow-gauge trains in the U. S. and was superintendent on the construction of Maine’s first narrow-gauge line, the Sandy River Railroad in 1879. Other lines followed. Many of the narrow-gauge lines were run to timber and sawmills.

One picture in MacDonald’s book shows an engine dwarfed by stacks of timber in a log yard near Madrid. A brace of pictures shows the former mill complex of Redington. In the first, a gang of at least 16 sawmill workers poses besides stacks of timber on the train platform outside the mill. The second photo shows abandoned buildings, an open field, and a roadbed stripped of rails. It is these kinds of photos and their history-filled captions that make MacDonald’s pictorial narrative compelling.

MacDonald loves trains, the trains themselves, the engines, the boxcars, and the passenger cars, showing his enthusiasm in amply detailed captions. Locomotive fans will find the book an unequivocal joy.

However MacDonald could have provided more history of stations, roundhouses and other buildings and whether they are still standing. He does at times. For example, he shows the Bigelow station in full swing in the days of horse and buggies and a modern picture of the still-standing station without a rail of track in sight. These juxtapositions make the book enjoyable both for those who love trains and those interested in the Maine’s history.

The most somber photographs are of the engines and cars abandoned on sidings after highways made the narrow-gauge railways obsolete in the 1930s. In the case of the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway, a train wreck meant the end of the line in 1933. A year after the wreck, the engine still stood sideways on a bank of the Sheepscot River, stripped of everything that could be taken away without a blowtorch, MacDonald writes.

While the narrow-gauge lines first turned to tourist excursions in the 1930s to keep running, their resurrection as tourist attractions did not get a full head of steam until the ’90s.

A cranberry grower in Massachusetts saved much of the Maine narrow-gauge rolling stock in the late 1930s, buying the engines and cars and setting up the Edaville RR in South Carver, Mass., to haul cranberries. It ran from 1946 until bankruptcy in 1991. A year later, the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Company & Museum was set up in Portland to purchase as much of the Edaville equipment as it could and bring it back to Maine, hauling what it bought by road in 1993.

Along with the Portland museum, there are narrow-gauge museums in Boothbay, Bridgton and Monson. At the end of the book, there is a list of the narrow-gauge railroad and transportation museums in Maine. For those who love trains and those who have children, this list should be helpful in planning plenty of weekend outings.