WHEN THE RAILROAD LEAVES TOWN: AMERICAN COMMUNITIES IN THE AGE OF RAIL LINE ABANDONMENT, by Joseph P. Schwieterman, Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Mo., 2001, 350 pages, $39.95.

A century ago, you could hop aboard a train at Boston’s North Station, feast on lobster and spend the night in a luxurious sleeping car before arriving the next morning at the Mount Desert Ferry terminal in Hancock. From there, the Sappho and other steamboats ferried travelers across Frenchman Bay to Bar Harbor and other points on Mount Desert Island.

For train buffs or people nostalgic for that scenic, leisurely era of travel, “When The Railroad Leaves Town,” offers insight on the rise and fall of Maine Central Railroad’s Waukeag Branch, which ran from Ellsworth to Mount Desert Ferry, in a chapter devoted to Ellsworth. The automobile’s growing popularity, the opening of a causeway to MDI in 1931, the destruction of much of downtown Ellsworth by fire and other factors led to the demise of the line in 1959.

Author Joseph P. Schwieterman, an associate professor of public services and director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at De Paul University, set out to chronicle the evolution of rail service in 64 eastern U.S. communities that had especially rich railroad histories or lost their lines due to controversial and unexpected developments. He also sought to put the elimination of rail service rail in a social and economic context and examine the benefits and losses.

“Railroads once spread across the American landscape, radiating from towns like spokes on a wheel,” Schwieterman writes, estimating that more than 120,000 miles of routes have been eliminated since 1916. “They were part of the skeleton of almost every community, the backbone of the municipal anatomy, and an essential element of commercial and civic life.”

For older residents, Schwieterman notes, passing trains were a daily ritual.

“For those living in small communities, few events provide such a visceral link between the past and the present as the ritualistic arrival and departure of local trains,” he says. “Railroads bring familiar sounds, sights and reverberations, such as the locomotive’s horn, the engineer’s wave, and the rumble of freight trains. When a railroad line disappears, it removes the last semblance of a familiar local institution and in some instances a prominent reminder of past transportation glory.”

Shifting tides

CHANGE IN THE WEATHER, by Jack Rickard, Windstorm Creative Ltd., Port Orchard, Wash., 2001, 92 pages, $10.95.

The sea and water are powerful vehicles of expression in “Change in the Weather,” a slim volume of verse by an Arizona-based writer who spends summers in Maine. Jack Rickard is attune to the ocean and its creatures – especially seabirds such as terns, storm petrels and cormorants – and uses them skillfully to explore various universal themes.

In “Herman Melville Goes to Sea,” a meditation on Moby Dick’s creator, commas and periods become marker buoys. “Here on this thin sheet of paper that enfolds his words in its rolling swells and splashes against the pen like surf,” goes the poem. “Gulls fly in and out of my head. Their squawking cries, doors pulled loose by a persistent wind, providing a bird-eye view of the print drifting across the page like Ishmael’s coffin, giving respite on this day where only storm birds take heart…”

Rickard, a former teacher of American and world history, makes his home in Phoenix, Ariz. His love of the water began in college while working at a lake resort in Kansas. The sea surfaces in a poem about Kansas farmers.

“Farmers, lost sailors, coughed up on land by adversity, walked inland from the ocean to Kansas,” he writes in “Men of The Sea.” “Planted their hands in the black dirt and called it home, knowing better. The great ocean of wheat, nodding under prairie skies, murmured the rhythm of the tides, wind in the rigging, white spumes on a raging sea, silver fish in a green surf…”

As a Marine, his weekends were taken up scuba diving from Laguna Beach to La Jolla on the Pacific Coast. Later in life, he summered on Mount Desert Island and at Pemaquid Point. His work has appeared in Maine publications including the Puckerbrush Review, Northwoods Journal and The River Review/La Revue Riviere.

“My thinking and perspective has been profoundly affected by the ocean,” he says. “Much of my writing is about water, how it changes our lives, our language and inner selves.”

Kindred spirits should enjoy this fine collection of poetry.

Fuel for thought

THE ADJUSTMENT, by Charles E. MacArthur, Morris Publishing, Kearney, Neb., 2002, 208 pages, $15.

Sangerville inventor Charles MacArthur has become well-known in Eastern Maine for his campaign to get Americans to consume less oil. In his quest, he has ridden an electric motorcycle to the summit of Mount Washington. In his home, he has a Sterling engine which runs on the principle of expansion and contraction of air and that can be powered by coffee or ice water. There’s also a fan powered by heat off a stove that circulates air throughout the house.

Several years ago, MacArthur began promoting the electrically powered Corbin Sparrow. The three-wheel vehicle, which looks like a VW Beetle, costs about 2 cents a mile to run in Maine. The Sangerville man had the first Sparrow east of the Rockies and could be seen test-driving the sporty, lime-green vehicle around Bangor.

“A lot of people believe in their heart, but they don’t feel any need to rush into it,” he told the Bangor Daily News, speaking about the need for greater energy efficiency. “It’s like that bumper sticker: `I’m spending my children’s inheritance.’ They want to put off till tomorrow, but tomorrow may happen too fast.”

Now, MacArthur has turned to fiction to further broadcast his message. In “The Adjustment,” he sets a grim, colorful scenario of New York City in 2009. Global warming has caused winters to get much colder and the hot temperatures hotter. The skyrocketing cost of fuel has driven cabbies out of business. Buses are operating on recycled animal fats prompting the city to stink of french fries and donuts. There’s even talk of reusing discarded fat from liposuction.

Leo Gallia, a gangling high school physics teacher, and Jodi Smith, Leo’s paramour and an astronomer at Cornell, are the main protagonists who suddenly find themselves in a massive power failure in Manhattan and for hundreds of miles around. The pair makes an unsuccessful attempt to escape the disaster in an SUV.

For people who like futuristic stories, and don’t mind spelling mistakes and an overall lack of copyediting, MacArthur’s tale is a funny, at times raucous, even steamy read.