  Photographs © John Mahoney The luxury executive car of the Bangor & Aroostook Line.
across the trestle Part 2 of a personal account of riding the Foliage Special excursion train from Newport down to St. Johnsbury in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom and the delights encountered
JOHN MAHONEY
we climb aboard on the Causeway. Talk about riding in the lap of luxury. This country boy could get accustomed to this real quick.
If this is how the high mucky-mucks of railroading moved about, no wonder the industry got in trouble. Plush chairs, deep sofas, stately tables, wall-to-wall carpeting, a compact kitchen at one end of the long car, two clean toilets at the other.
I settle in with a fresh donut and a hot cup of black coffee, lean back and cross my legs, and count myself lucky.
But I am in danger here of misleading you.
Do not believe for a minute that, if next Saturday or Sunday, you lay down your $16 for a round-trip ticket to St. Johnsbury that you will be luxuriating in this car.
The luxury car, friends, is for entertaining corporate customers and special occasions, like the Press run I was on. (No apology intended. Somebody has to write about this stuff.)
Unfortunately, it wouldn't take John and Jane Q. Public long to destroy this kind of car. Hell, on the trip I made there was a little boy tagging along with his dad and it didn't take him long to start zooming his matchbox cars across the top of a polished antique table. |
No, you will be in a regular passenger car, which is very nice, or perhaps in the baggage car with doors open and safely fenced so you can see the color of the changing leaves up close.
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Photojournalist Lia Roozendaal of The Chronicle of Orleans County samples the comfort of a single-person compartment during the foliage excursion. This rolling stock was bought from Canada's VIA rail line. |
| We make a stately exit out of town, cross the trestle to the South Yard, and pick up another 2000 HP diesel-electric locomotive -- a "unit" in railroad talk. Engineer Truman Peck tells me that we'll need both units to haul up the grade south of Barton. The fallen leaves make the tracks very slippery.
The train wends its way south to Orleans, paralleling the Barton River through the swampy lowlands. The river is old and twists and turns on its way north to Lake Memphremagog. It is very shallow this time of year. Everywhere there are bright splashes of color: reds, and golds, and yellows; the sumacs have gone scarlet and the ferns are turning brown and rusty. The only sound is the clacking and groaning of the train.
"You have to be alert every minute," he adds.
We keep rolling...
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We approach Coventry Station -- now just a gravel road crossing the train tracks in the puckerbrush. The engineer sounds the train whistle, warning of our approach. Later, up in the cab, he tells of the madness of some drivers who try to beat the train at the crossings. There are nearly 50 crossings between Wells River and Newport and every one, says Truman Peck, contains a potential disaster.