The other roads weren’t; not so much, anyway. They used vacuum brakes or simply stuck a hickory in the brake-wheel and laid back on it. Their operation was more short-line, jerkwaterish, and patchy. The Bridgton & Saco River (and if you don’t mind, that’s pronounced SAW’ko) was nearest to the Sandy River in this kind of excellence. Maybe due somewhat to Maine Central influence, too. While the Wiscasset road was the only one to have a separate-tender engine like the Sandy River’s it wasn’t nearly as up to date and spic and span as the Bridgton line. [Illustration: (_Moody Photo_) Back home. Little No. 4 engine ready to leave Monson for her morning trip to the Junction, before wars and depressions laid her low. ] [Illustration: (_Moody Photo_) End of the trail. Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington No. 8 never turned a wheel again, after this wreck at Whitefield Iron Bridge in far-off 1933. ] [Illustration: (_Atwood Photo_) The New Year’s Special puffs through the frosty Cape Cod air, telling the cockeyed world that miser gauges can run in the snow. ] The B. & S. R. was built in 1882. The first train into town was on January 21 the following year, “packed with exultant citizens and numerous representatives of the rising generation”, so writes William McLin in his interesting history _The Twenty-four Inch Gauge Railroad at Bridgton, Maine_. The Edaville gets demonstrations of that “rising generation” idea, too! This sixteen mile line ran from the Maine Central at Hiram up through some pretty wild country to Bridgton, and fifteen years later another six miles to Harrison was added--along the shores of Long Lake. They ran lots of trains, too. See that old time card over here on the wall: looks like a lineup of Braintree Locals. They made money. Probably that’s why the Maine Central bought it in 1912. Like the Sandy River’s case, they made lots of improvements although the little tike was in pretty good shape anyway. The machine shop was in Bridgton but it wasn’t on a par with the Sandy River’s Phillips shop; most of the heavy work went to Thompson’s Point for the Maine Central to do. Mr. Atwood has that machine shop here in Edaville now. Well, by this time people must have decided that George Mansfield was a second Moses and that his slim gauge railways puffed right into Heaven. Infection had spread like chicken-pox. The Monson Railroad, ’way up Moosehead Lake way, had been built in 1883, six miles long with a couple of miles in slate quarry spurs.