Those old two-footers were some roads. Many of my happiest recollections are of rides I had on the Wiscasset road and the Sandy River. Never saw so much of the Bridgton line until the last year it ran. The Kennebec Central checked out before I checked in, although I used to see their tiny trains when I was a kid. I knew the little Monson--_the Two by Six_ they called it, two feet wide and six miles long--but only after it got kind of dilapidated. I’ve seen ’em all. And here’s the last one: using the very same engines and cars that I used to ride on years ago. Seems funny, too: to come down here and find ’em resurrected again. Those little pikes tried so hard to climb up to the sun, and a bumping-post in the sunset was the best they could do. The sunset of pint-size railroads. Funny: here’s this last one, here in eastern Massachusetts; and seventy some years ago the _first_ one got its christening within a few miles of this very spot. Up in Billerica, where the B. & M.’s big shops are now. Someone must have swung the bottle too hard and konked the little cuss on its pituitary gland. Anyway, besides being a baptismal ceremony it was a death blow too. [Illustration: (_Atwood Photo_) A baby boxcar is gingerly loaded onto a Hall trailer at Bridgton Junction, Maine, for its 200-mile jaunt down the Pike to South Carver. Forty cars and engines made the trip this way--without mishap. ] [Illustration: (_Atwood Photo_) Bridgton Yard was a sorry looking mess in 1945. A marked contrast to their condition in Edaville today. Roland Badger’s therapy soon restored them to their original splendor, eh? ] It was this way: a feller named George Mansfield from up Lowell way had taken a trip over to Wales (coal-passing, most likely) and was pretty well sold on the two-foot Festiniog Railway there. The Festiniog was the very first of these flea gauges, and had been built fifty years before George went back. He couldn’t see why they wouldn’t be just as successful over here; kind of miscalculated on his grand-children’s idiosyncrasies, though. George returned to the New World as full of ideas as a New Dealer. You might say he’d got narrow minded--two-feet wide. He bla-blaad to everyone who’d listen and when they stopped listening he hired a hall and gave away a new Ford on the lucky ticket. He talked two-feet gauge. He may have even drawn chalk pictures. He built a sample railroad in his back yard with two-by-four for rails. Named it the Sumner Heights & Somethingwood Valley. Luckily he didn’t have an eighteen hundred acre lot or the Edaville would be just another backyard railroad today. [Illustration: