This Space for Rent

A Mountain Railroad (pt 4)

During the second world war, the PV&T, along with every other railroad connecting Portland to Montreal, suffered from a large increase in bridge traffic. Since the PV&T was electrified, it wasn't much of a problem over about 80% of the Portland to Montreal line, but the mountain division, in the grand tradition of what generations of Managing Engineers had called "the stupidest damn railroad in North America" started to bottleneck again.

Not because of the traffic load; The PV&T made it a policy to overpower their trains just so those engines could be brought online to help pull freights over Mount Cube and over the Thetford ramp, so a train could make it up one of the scary ramps in about 30 minutes, and when traffic loads became heavy the railroad could dispatch multiple trains up and down the ramps (with 2 mile separations so there would always be a runaway ramp between two trains.) No, the problem was that the powerplants that provided electricity to this section of the railroad didn't have enough power to run all of these trains. Prior to the war, it was not a problem; There were only a dozen or so trains a day (4 passenger, 8 freight); there was (obviously) no local freight traffic on Mount Cube and the local traffic for businesses on the Woodsville branch was handled by a pair of class A locomotives which operated out of Thetford Center yard), so the aging power plant in Thetford was able to provide enough power without any trouble. But when the number of trains went from 12 to 24 or 28, the powerplant just couldn't keep up.

In the middle of 1940, a meeting was held to discuss ways of correcting the latest bottleneck. A crop of proposals were brought up:

  1. Bring in steam locomotives to bank trains over Mount Cube and the Thetford Ramp. This was written off because there were
    1. No steam servicing facilities within 120 rail miles of Thetford,
    2. Not enough steam engines on the railroad, so the PV&T would have to sit in line to buy them, and that would only happen if the War Department said it was okay
  2. Bring in diesel locomotives to bank trains over Mount Cube. This had the same disadvantages as using steam locomotives, plus nobody on the PV&T had the skills needed to keep diesel locomotives running. (This wasn't strictly true; the new DL1 locomotives were on the property, but the Concord shop crews were still getting training from Alco field engineers on care and feeding of 539 engines.)
  3. Replace the powerplant. This was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm, by the operating department, because they were certain that traffic levels would never drop.
  4. Go to the War Department and ask them to help encourage the Boston & Maine into giving the PV&T trackage rights from West Rumney to the Connecticut river, then build a connection from there to the Wood River branch. It wouldn't help with the Thetford ramp, but only having one steep ramp instead of three would cut down most of the overload on the Thetford powerplant. Plus, if the Boston & Maine agreed to temporarily extend the trackage rights up to Woodsville and you could borrow some steam engines from other railroads, you could start diverting trains as soon as you built an interchange and rudimentary service facilities at West Rumney.

When this fourth solution was proposed, there was a long thoughtful silence, while the management imagined the Boston & Maine's reaction to this proposal, followed by an embarrassingly quick unanimous vote to try this one first. The next day, the president of the PV&T paid a visit to Washington, DC, to chat with the War Department about methods of improving the flow of material to the eastern seaboard. A month after that, the presidents of the PV&T and Boston & Maine sat down to a long informal meeting at a private club in Boston, and emerged with an agreement to give Parsons Vale traffic rights on the Boston & Maine from West Rumney to Woodsville. Two days later, a switch was installed connecting a suspiciously new yard in West Rumney to the Boston & Maine's line to Woodsville, and five steam engines (three MTRR class 344 Mikados, and a couple of PV&T class 101 Mountains) started pulling trains from West Rumney to Woodsville and back.

By June, 1941, the PV&T had put in an interchange at Haverhill, and had gotten War Department and Boston & Maine permission to electrify from West Rumney to Haverhill. By the spring of 1942, that electrification was complete (28 miles, 1500 line poles, 2 substations, 4 towers, new telephone lines, and everything) and every freight train on the Montreal to Portland line was using the long way around Mount Cube (passenger trains still went over Mount Cube, because the views were spectacular) and the operating department was happily reporting that, even with the (fairly high) usage fees that the Boston & Maine was charging it was still costing 1/3 less to operate a train the long way around the mountain.

When the second world war ended, both the Parsons Vale and the Boston & Maine found themselves in the same boat as all of the other New England railroads; freight traffic fell right off a cliff, as did passenger traffic. In earlier days, the Boston & Maine would have been happy to kick the PV&T off their railroad, but they found that the steady stream of money coming from That Other Railroad made up for the indignity of sharing the line with it.

In 1948, the Engineering Department held a big party when the PV&T decided to sign a long-term trackage sharing agreement with the Boston & Maine and then to abandon the Mount Cube line; the Managing Engineer personally visited North Dorchester and tacked up the closure notice at the depot there. In 1950, the abandonment was approved, and by 1951 the only thing left of the "stupidest damn railroad in North America" was a nice wide gravel road running up one side of Mount Cube and down the other, and the distant Hoot! of the class Ds running along the Baker River valley.

(Postscript:In 1956, the PV&T purchased the Barre & Chelsea Railroad rail line from Woodsville to Montpelier with the plan of avoiding the now 30 mile jog south through Thetford (to say nothing of the Thetford ramp, which was the last really horrible grade on the railroad.) It was not electrified anywhere nearly as quickly as the Rumney to Haverhill line, and didn't become the new mainline until 1973, after the merger with the MTRR and LT&L, and after building a new powerplant to replace the ancient one in Thetford.)