The ten two-footers in Maine boasted about 212 miles of line. They were built and run like the big railroads. Had freight, and passenger trains. Were governed by the same laws and regulations. And were immensely vital to the loves and lives of the neighborhood. Their smoky smells were just as alluring and they could holler just as loud. I always thought they were a bit more democratic and hail-fellow-well-met than the more decorous grownups. Colorful, and kind of dramatic, too! They passed, not because folks wanted all railroads alike. Not because they didn’t measure up. Worse than that. They limped into the sunset because people didn’t use them any more. Their _gauge_ made no difference. Plenty of standard gauges puffed into the limbo too. Neither could run without money. The two-footers stood it longer than their more expensive relatives of wider size. No. Their narrow gauge wasn’t the reason although the standardization tycoons beefed about non-conformity and the cost of transferring freight. The decade of the 1930’s saw them go. For a while longer the Bridgton line and the little Monson were tolerated by some and cherished by a few, but when clouds of Peace darkened the war-red sky they were gone--the last two-footer had whistled off leaving only memory-trains to scoot through the mid-regions of the past. That’s why the Edaville Railroad stands out. Why it’s a splendid anti-climax to an era of colorful midget railroading. Not so much because it’s the last survivor, as I persist in calling it, as a resurrection--an ideal risen from the ashes of Yesterday. Here it is: not a synthetical reproduction but those very same engines and cars that made railroad history for three generations, alive and puffing again on Ellis Atwood’s eighteen-hundred acres. A seed from history that now blooms with the cranberries, sprouting in that same sand that perennializes faded shrubs from the Holy Commonwealth, Plymouth Colony, America in the making. That’s why I had to have an _Introduction_. All right? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ EDAVILLE RAILROAD THE CRANBERRY BELT Well, well, well; just look at this-- The Edaville Railroad. Eighteen hundred acres long and only two feet wide! Let’s look it over. There’s nothing like it anywhere. As if Plymouth County and the town of Carver weren’t famous enough already, not to mention Ellis Atwood’s model cranberry plantation, this little narrow gauge railroad now vies with cranberry crops and _Mayflower_ packets in spectacular “firsts”.