Oh I could gab for hours about it: how those towns raised money to build it on the express condition that trains be polluting the virgin air of Phillips by November 20, 1879 or not one blankity-blanked penny would they pay. And how, the night before, track still lacked half a mile of the town line--but maybe all this moldy lore of sixty-eight years ago doesn’t interest you as much as the Edaville of today--the _last_ two-footer. [Illustration: (_Hosmer Photo_) The de luxe coach “Elthea”. They even come in perambulators to ride Mr. Atwood’s train! ] Eh? Did they make it before the fatal hour? You bet they did! Why, the gang hove to that night with axes and oxen and the way they scattered railroad track up that last half mile would make Mr. Atwood’s track-layers look like sit-down strikers. More B. T. U.’s sparked off that night than in the whole city of Boston. The little Hinckley engine, twelve tons of brass and headlight, tottered behind the galloping track gang and, just as the clock in the steeple dumped its jackpot, the last rail clattered down; and Hinckley No. 1 fumed defiantly into Phillips. The town’s check was good! (No thank you, Mr. Atwood; I can’t eat clam sandwiches and talk at the same time. You eat it.) [Illustration: (_Moody Photo_) Ted Goodreau throws the switch, backing a work train into the gravel pit. She’ll emerge from the spur with some 20 yards of sand for ballasting purposes. ] [Illustration: (_Atwood Photo_) This tiny Brooksville locomotive with 13 1-yard dumpcars was Mr. Atwood’s construction train last year. ] As I was saying, almost before that first train got turned around there was an avalanche of business. Exponents of the railroad were slapping each other on the back and thumbing their beaks at the sour-puss skeptics. A year or so later and all Franklin County was lathered up: everyone wanted a railroad. Kingfield was first to get it. Somehow the Boston egg-men, A. & O. W. Mead, got snarled in it. They began their Franklin & Megantic Railroad, Strong to Kingfield, fourteen and a half miles, in 1884. It was a pretty road. Full of curves as a chorus girl and lush with wild, bucolic scenery. You could see Mount Abram looming up five thousand feet, and Mount Bigelow was still higher. At Mount Abram Junction you could almost spit on ’em, they were so close.