OLD TOWN – Potential buyers on Monday visited the Georgia-Pacific Corp. mill, and state Economic Development Commissioner Jack Cashman said he expects to have more information about any progress toward a sale at the end of the week.

“It’s about the same as it has been,” Cashman said Monday. “We’re going through a process of taking people through [the mill] and providing them with information.”

Seven parties from in Maine and out of state are interested in purchasing the mill, according to Cashman. He said he gave two tours through the facility Monday, and more buyers are expected to visit the site in the next few days.

G-P officials announced last week that they are closing the Old Town facility and its four connected chip mills in Portage, Houlton, Milo and Costigan. There is hope that a new buyer will be found in the 60 days that G-P has agreed to maintain the mill before completing the closure process.

Cashman and Gov. John Baldacci are optimistic that two months will be enough time to secure a new buyer and retain the 400 jobs that would be lost if the mill permanently closes.

With the facility no longer operating, the impact of the shutdown is affecting a variety of businesses, including the railways that once transported wood chips from the chip mills.

Maine Montreal & Atlantic Railway Ltd., which has a central office in Hermon, had been hauling chips from the Portage chip mill to South LaGrange, where the chips then were loaded onto tractor-trailer trucks and taken to the mill.

“We’re waiting to see whether somebody else buys the mill, but it’s a sizable amount of revenue, about 4 percent,” Fred Yocum, chief financial officer for the railway, said Monday of the impact the G-P closure is having on the company.

On an average day, Maine Montreal & Atlantic was transporting about 20 cars, each carrying 70 tons of wood chips to South LaGrange. That made an average transport of 14,000 tons a day, or 70,000 tons during the five-day workweek, Yocum said.

Guilford Rail System of North Billerica, Mass., also transports products for G-P, but repeated efforts to reach a company representative for comment were unsuccessful last week and Monday.

In the meantime, the shutdown process is continuing at the mill.

All of the pulp and tissue machines have been shut down at this point, according to Robert Burns, a G-P spokesman from Atlanta who was in Old Town on Monday for the site visits by potential buyers.

About 160 people still are working at the mill during the shutdown process. That number is expected to decrease to about 90 by the end of the week.

If a buyer isn’t found, Yocum said, Maine Montreal & Atlantic will have to wait and see what happens to the source of the wood and the chippers before it makes any final decisions.

“We probably would not have to let people go, but it would have an impact on us,” Yocum said.