Five years of growth at Alna’s Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway Museum have created a need to rebuild one of the original railway’s locomotives from scratch. The museum’s work overlaps with longtime dreams for a number of its members, including the project manager.
The original railway, first incorporated as the Wiscasset and Quebec Railroad, operated in the Sheepscot Valley from 1895 to 1937 on 2-foot narrow gauge tracks.
The museum, founded in 1989 with founder Harry Percival Jr.’s goal since childhood to restore the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway and its equipment, takes on long-term restoration projects at its Cross Road headquarters and offers historically focused steam-powered train rides to the public, among other programs.
The museum began growing rapidly in recent years, according to members. It added SeaLyon Farm as a destination for train rides in 2017. The introduction of online ticket sales during the pandemic, originally begun in an effort to control passenger spacing due to capacity restrictions, brought events to a wider audience and trips began selling out.
Separately, the railway’s “Mountain Extension” project, which opened last summer, added three-quarters of a mile of track to reach a donated bridge newly installed over Trout Brook.
“That particular part of the railroad that we had to rebuild for the bridge is very steep for railroad operations,” project manager Jason Lamontagne said. “A 1% grade on a railroad is noticeable. Two percent is formidable. We have places of 4% going down to this bridge, and historically, they called it ‘The Mountain.’”
The railway’s smallest locomotive could hardly pull itself up the hill, much less a train, according to Lamontagne. Alongside its public programs, the museum has completed major restoration projects including its locomotive No. 9, a dairy car, a Model T railcar, boxcars, and a tank car, preparing it build a locomotive from the ground up.
The museum settled on the original railway’s 28-ton No. 7 locomotive, built in 1907 at the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, Pa. and renamed the No. 11 for the museum’s collection. It was damaged in a 1931 roundhouse fire and scrapped several years afterward, never repaired – but not forgotten by members who had long hoped to rebuild it.
“Suddenly, this idea of No. 11 went from backburner to ‘We need this locomotive, operationally,’” due to its larger size and strength, Lamontagne said.
Though work got underway in 2022, rebuilding the engine has been a decades-long dream for members and volunteers, including Lamontagne.
At age 9, he read a book about the early days of the railway that his father brought home from L.L. Bean. “Big Dreams and Little Wheels,” by Ruth Crosby Wiggin, told stories from the railway’s history and featured a cover photo of the No. 7 in the railway’s former yard on the Sheepscot River, today the home of Wiscasset Elementary School’s ballfield.
“It grabbed me at just the right age, so I got obsessed, and I started getting grandiose ideas of rebuilding the railroad,” he said. He even asked his local state representative for a copy of the original railway’s charter, which he received.
Lamontagne and his father took a road trip along the original route of the railroad several years later to plan how he would rebuild it. There, they came across a shed at the Cross Road site for the group that preceded the museum, called the Sheepscot Valley Railroaders, and a copy of their mission statement to rebuild the railroad. Lamontagne has been involved ever since.
While in high school in the 1990s, he made technical drawings of the No. 11 engine using old photographs. It remained a “backburner project” for years as Lamontagne picked away at hand drawings and renderings until planning began in earnest in 2020 with a team of volunteer machinists and engineers.
In the early 2000s, the museum’s board voted on a statement of intent to build the No. 11, without a timeline. Early volunteers began some patterns, and the bell yoke and bell were cast 20 years ago.
The idea of rebuilding an engine at the WW&F began with museum founder Percival in the 1970s in case he could not gain access to the only remaining steam engine from original railroad operations, the current No. 9 engine that the WW&F eventually purchased.
“But then we still had this idea planted of building an engine, and as we’ve restored engines here, we got to realize this is achievable,” Lamontagne said. “We have the skill to know how.”
These days, each piece of the engine is puzzled together through historical resources and drawn in computer drafting programs before production on-site or at Mountain Machine Works in Auburn.
A collection of original documents improbably acquired over decades guide the redesign process, including a builder’s photograph before the engine left the factory in 1907; an erecting card, or assemblage view, of the exact engine donated by a museum member over 20 years ago; and a specification sheet that Lamontagne ordered from Texas in the late 1990s.
That information is also compared against historical factory documents for assembling engine pieces. A master document for the bill of materials has 637 lines so far.
The project has raised over $265,000 since 2020, and a group of seven core volunteers alongside 10 occasional helpers hope to have the engine in service in the next five years.
“It was one of those that started as an obsession, and then we kind of justified it,” Lamontagne said.
For more information, go to wwfry.org.
