This little pike didn’t swell with the financial pregnancy that busted the more copious Sandy River shirt. The F. & M. was always broke. A cussed feeling, too; take it from me. Several reorganizations and the final exodus of the Mead boys made no difference. While they managed to relay the original twenty-five pound rail with bigger thirty-five pound stuff they did little grade improving or curve relocation. Track went up and around with the whims of Mother Nature, and the old harridan whimmed plenty in that rugged country. The snow they had! You should see some of the old pictures of snow-fighting (Maybe Mr. Atwood has some here); it was nothing to see a man’s head sticking out, and then learn that he was standing on top of a boxcar. In the early ’90’s, under the paper name of Kingfield & Dead River, the F. & M. built fifteen and a half miles of road from Kingfield up through Carrabasset to Bigelow, a booming lumber town. Today Bigelow _ain’t_. You just drive up through there and wonder where the place was. This thirty mile line rivaled even the P. & R. in wild, rustic beauty. If only those wintry hills could have been cranberry country! About this same time some other Massachusetts business men (See: the Bay Staters were always the power behind these midget gauges!) dumped their pennies into the twenty-nine mile Phillips & Rangeley Railroad, from Phillips up over Redington Mountain to Rangeley. You should have seen it. What a railroad. One reverse curve after another; three and four per cent grades with Sluice Hill and the Devil’s Elbow going over five per cent. Grand country, too: wooded hills spouting white-water streams--where trout frolic in the rapids and thumb their little noses at you. [Illustration: (_Atwood Photo_) Nancy Merritt sells Mr. Atwood’s souvenir tickets, and maybe her big smile is why a thousand are often sold in a single day! You may ride on the Edaville free, but the 5c souvenir tickets seem to be in popular demand. ] [Illustration: (_Moody Photo_) The cranberry train hauls up at a bog crossing, and a few boxes of berries are loaded aboard. Mr. Atwood is more than pleased with his little railroad’s utility value. ] [Illustration: (_Atwood Photo_) Big business today at 14-Acre Bog. About 30 truck-miles are reduced to 4-boxcar miles when berries are hauled by train. The slogan “Ship-and-Travel-by-Rail” is in full effect on the Edaville road. ]