Wish I had time to tell you about the Bridgton’s last sickness. What a time they had! The town owned it, you know. Most of the folks wanted to junk it while a few enterprising souls hung on. In cahoots with some railroad fans its president, Lester Ames, put up a lively scrap to save the little line. Lasted a couple of years, that wrangling. First, the railroad champions would be on top, and then their dark-complexioned adversaries were eye-gouging or had a knee in the railroad’s bowels. It looked bad. Hard telling how long it might have lasted but the _coup de grace_ came suddenly when someone slipped through a deal with an uninnocent junkman. Spikes flew. So did Mr. Atwood. [Illustration: (_Moody Photo_) The moribund Bridgton line in 1941, when fan excursions and passionate junkmen were running wild. Here No. 8 is ready to haul a crowd of railroad-fans down the line. ] [Illustration: (_Moody Photo_) An Edaville work train climbs Mt. Urann past the probable site of the Ball Field station. See Mr. Atwood’s snowplow hibernating at the far end of the siding. ] [Illustration: (_Moody Photo_) The Edaville Railroad will never be completed. New spurs and siding beckon from isolated bogs. Here a crew is ballasting a new spur to 31 Bog. ] [Illustration: (_Moody Photo_) Engineer Knight and Fireman Young bat a freight train across the bog, and will shortly return loaded with red, sour bog-nuggets (cranberries, to you). ] He’d been keeping tabs on it anyway and when this junk-shark (_he_ came from Massachusetts, too!) began wrecking things Mr. Atwood A-carded up there, plum full of adrenaline, and managed to buy quite a lot of equipment. No. 7 engine, some cars, and the turntable. Paid through the nose for it, too. Worse still, after paying the money and assuming ownership, this junk-expert would turn around and cut it up for scrap, claiming he didn’t know that Mr. Atwood wanted it! Biggest wonder in the world he didn’t put the torch to No. 7 engine. This was all in 1941. That fall the track was gone and the cars stored at Bridgton Junction. The connoisseur who’d previously bought the parlor car, Eric Sexton of Rockport, Maine, also bought some of these B. & S. R. cars for the same reason--to preserve ’em for posterity. Another fan, Edgar Mead, bought two or three. John Holt and Van Walsh, who’d fallen in love with No. 8 engine, bought her. That greasy junkman sure cleaned up on those fellers. In the end, however, Mr. Atwood owned it all and got a corner on two-foot gauge railroads!