Trails Day in Machias brings boxcar curiosity

MACHIAS – Whose boxcar is it, anyway?

That’s what organizers of the National Trails Day event at Station 98, the old railroad station along the abandoned Calais Branch line of tracks, were asking one another on Saturday.

Station 98 is destined to become a focal point of the trail once the Maine Department of Conservation goes to work on taking up the tracks and putting down a multi-use, recreational trail in its place.

When completed, the trail will run 87 miles from Washington Junction in Hancock to Ayers Junction in Pembroke.

Built in 1898, it was supposed to be restored by 1998, but instead Station 98 has lingered as an eyesore for years, with peeling paint, a bad roof and an interior filled with pigeon waste.

The pigeon mess was removed this spring and a new roof installed as part of the town of Machias’ efforts to make the station a focus for downtown renewal. The paint project comes next.

But the old-fashioned boxcar that sits on the tracks behind the station isn’t quite ready for its facelift.

“We’re not sure who owns it,” Louise West, executive director of the Machias Bay Area Chamber of Commerce, said Saturday as rain poured down on the event.

“We think it belongs to the town, but it’s not very clear on the deed.”

The town owns Station 98, but the boxcar lies beyond the former station’s footprint. If the town doesn’t own it as “adjoining property,” then the Department of Transportation is the likely owner, those who have studied the deed assume.

Either way, it probably can’t easily be moved.

The local chamber of commerce has taken an interest in the station and the boxcar because they occupy space that could eventually serve as a rest stop or informational kiosk for those using the trail – or for those passing by in cars along U.S. Route 1.

Even public restrooms are being imagined for the boxcar, if it ends up staying as a relic of the railroad era.

The National Park Service recently contributed $3,000 in matching funds to the cause of turning the boxcar into something useful. That big check was on display Saturday, made out to the Sunrise Trail Coalition of citizens who worked for 15 years to convince the Maine Legislature to remove 87 miles of tracks and make a trail instead.

The transformation to trail was approved in April in Augusta. The Department of Conservation takes on the trail-making project from here, in coordination with planning from DOT.

Once the boxcar got talked about and thoroughly walked around, some walkers put on their pedometers and headed out on the tracks for a Saturday-morning stroll – in spite of the steady rain.