A train departing from a station is a ritual, a quite formal one. The men presiding this day at North Conway, N.H., were Edward Sauer, resplendent in a dark blue conductor`s uniform; Courtney H. Gregg, the 34-year-old locomotive engineer; and Jonathan Howard, a college student who would shovel three quarters of a ton of soft coal into the firebox of locomotive No. 47 on the 11-mile round trip over the Conway Scenic Railroad.
Getting the go-ahead from the road`s president, general manager and chief ticket seller, Dwight A. Smith, Sauer relayed the high sign from the platform to the cab. The engineer, Gregg, notched the throttle out and, with a sharp blast of the steam whistle, No. 47 backed and hissed her way out of the station yard, past the golfers at the North Conway Country Club waiting to tee off from trackside, and began rolling down the 3.5 percent grade toward Conway with five coaches in tow.
Among the 250 passengers on a brilliant summer day last July, parents were pointing to the engine clanking and swaying and pouring out clouds of black sulfurous smoke and saying, with complete accuracy for once, ”choo-choo” to the babies on their knees. Kids in the converted open boxcar just behind the engine covered their ears as the whistle blew four times–two long blasts, one short and another long–for the grade crossings, and got wet from the drops of condensed steam billowing from the pistons.
The locomotive worked harder as the train crossed a trestle over a crystal-clear river and started upgrade, producing a sound more like barking than huffing and puffing. Passengers farther back in the maroon and red steel passenger cars admired the views of Mount Washington and the nearby Moat Range off to the right and, in the foreground, the cornfields and the stables of Eastern Slope Farm, the largest dairy farm in New Hampshire. The sweet smell of pine lumber drying in the sun wafted in as the train passed a sawmill, then entered an evergreen woods, and there was a glimpse of an abandoned cemetery, a family plot, under the boughs just off the tracks. One more trestle, over the Swift River, and the train rounded a curve, slowed and crossed N.H. Hwy. 16 in Conway.
Truckers held up by the flashing red lights blew their air horns in salute; tourists in cars waved, got out and took pictures, and cheered. They were cheering the past, of course, brought back by this great iron horse working and straining and battling to pull the train up the steep New England grades. Anyone who ever saw a steam locomotive as a child will instantly have a thousand memories of that time brought back to mind on seeing one, smelling the smoke, just hearing the mournful whistle again.
That`s why Lewis Bissell, the trainman on this trip, was here. He wore a pocket watch his father earned in 1950 for half a century of working on the Maine Central Railroad. Smith worked on the Boston & Maine, which used to own the North Conway branch, for 26 years. Disappointed, perhaps, by the B&M`s decision to do away with steam in the early 1950s, he bought what was to become No. 47 from the Canadian National Railways for $7,500 in 1968.
The idea of starting a steam excursion railroad in North Conway came to him because steam was already only a memory in New England then. Its last stronghold was the Canadian Pacific Railway`s line across the woods of northern Maine, where the echoes of steam whistles rolled across the lakes along with the cries of loons right up until about 1961. I know because my grandfather, who grew up in Brownville, Me., was a rail buff and, in our family, visiting the CPR`s roundhouse in Brownville Junction was a summer ritual.
My grandfather made his teaching career in southern New England and moved his family to Westboro, Mass., on the Boston & Albany`s main line, in the 1930s. When I was little he used to take me trackside with him to take pictures, and if we were lucky, we would see one of the high-stepping Hudson steam locomotives of the New York Central, marching the New England States express through town.
By the early 1960s, when you went down to the tracks to see the New England States you saw only diesels at the head end. By the early 1970s, the New York Central was the Penn Central and the New England States was a one-car train to Albany. Soon the Penn Central died out altogether and so did the train.
My grandfather ascribed the decline of railroading in its purest form, steam, to the financiers who owned the railroads and drove them into bankruptcy. In his view, diesels did the dirty work for them, efficiently squeezing money out of the lines until the rails rusted and the unprofitable passenger depots could be boarded up. By the mid-1960s there wasn`t any passenger service at all, steam or diesel, in Maine or northern New Hampshire; the last regular B&M train to North Conway ran in December, 1961.
But it wasn`t just financiers that nearly ruined passenger railroading in New England; it was faithlessness, and my grandfather was as guilty of it as anybody else.
His diaries in 1919, after he got back from France and the war, tell of railroad journeys all through New England, all of them behind steam. He wrote of trips from Portland to Boston over the Boston & Maine when he could count the granite mileposts flashing by every 50 seconds (more than 70 miles an hour), speeds duplicated nowadays only on Amtrak`s fastest express lines. He earned pocket money one year at Bates College by working as a trolley car conductor, sometimes highballing home on the last run, without passengers, at even greater breakneck speeds.
But none of it was as much fun as the first car he got, a Nash, in 1923, even if it took eight hours and more to drive 150 miles. It was the car and the freedom it brought to him and millions of other people like him that relegated the rails, and steam, from practical conveyance to nostalgic romanticism, and 40 years later there was no passenger service at all on the B&M between Portland and Boston. The diesels weren`t the engines of destruction; they were a last-ditch defense against it.
The economics–steam versus diesel–are evident right on the Conway Scenic Railway.
”Coal comes $70 or $75 a ton, and it takes three tons a day, and two men working, to keep No. 47 going,” Smith said. ”The old Boston & Maine F-7 diesel takes nine gallons of home furnace oil, and one man, to make one run.” The F-7 is a freight model built by General Motors` Electro-Motive Division back in 1949, one of three diesels on the railroad`s property, though it belongs to a railroad club in Portland.
My grandfather would have been vastly amused to find fan clubs now venerating diesel locomotives as they do; he would have been more interested in the wheel arrangement of No. 47, which is an 0-6-0 (no forward pony truck wheel, three driving wheels on each side, and no trailing wheel under the cab), or on the other working steam locomotive run by the railroad, a 2-6-2 oil burner. Or in the North Conway depot, built in 1874 to a design by Nathaniel J. Bradlee of Boston, an exotic design with twin wooden towers vaguely reminiscent of the Yaroslavl Railway Station in Moscow, which was built later. Now, brightly painted in yellow and maroon, it seems to deserve its place on the National Register of Historic Places.
It also is a souvenir store and has a snack bar for the visiting passengers.
The round trip takes about an hour, with passengers able to get off the train while the engine switches ends at Conway and assumes a more traditional posture, cowcatcher first, to pull the cars back to the beginning of the line. Most people then get aboard again; the most comfortable rides are in the conventional coaches, dating from the 1920s, some of which have had handsome renovations of woodwork. The seats reverse so nobody has to ride backward on the return trip.
The view from the station platform, and much of the line, looks out to the wooded peaks of the White Mountains in the distance, but the sign on the ticket counter inside says ”We do NOT climb a mountain.” The reference is to the Mount Washington cog railway farther up in the hills, whose specially built steam locomotives, backs permanently hunched to keep the water in the boilers level up the steep grades, push cars full of tourists all the way to the 6,288-foot summit.
Conway Scenic runs daily all summer and through the fall foliage season, and opens up again briefly over Thanksgiving as well. Winter is a time for the permanent staff to keep the locomotives and the antique passenger cars, which come from the Maine Central, the Delaware & Hudson, the Grand Trunk and the Central of New Jersey, in good running order.
Gregg, the chief mechanic as well as occasional engineer, says, however,
”There`s no such thing as a totally repaired steam engine; there`s just a running steam engine.”
Ours had a formal sense of obligation, though. It got us back.
