Riding the Maine Eastern

Last Saturday I did something I've been wanting to do ever since I discovered that an excursion train runs between Brunswick (half an hour south of where I live) to Rockland, on the coast. I took that train trip. I had hesitated over making the trip up to now because of the cost, or what I thought was the cost, i.e., $60 round trip. The alumnae association of Simmons College, where I went to library school, was offering the trip, plus lunch, plus admission to the highly regarded Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, for what I thought was $15 less than that regular round trip fare alone. As it turns out, the round-trip fare at this time of year is only $40, but I feel the extras included in my trip made it worthwhile.

Naturally the weather was miserable. We have had weeks and weeks of glorious, dry weather, so last Saturday it rained. And was chillier than the forecasts had led me to believe it would be. I found myself underdressed, which is very unusual for me. I tend to take into consideration every possible contingency, as physical discomfort completely distracts me from whatever I might be trying to do. In this instance I needed a top layer, like, say, a raincoat. And I could have used some gloves. Standing in line waiting to get on the train (for a good 20 minutes), and later walking from the train station to the restaurant where we were to have lunch, I had to dredge up what little Maine stoicism I've managed to accrue in four years. But at least I did have an umbrella.

My first surprise was the train "station" in Brunswick. The infor-mation card I had from Simmons directed me to a new depot on Maine Street, but that is not yet in operation. I had to go into the bank behind it and ask where the train station was. After a series of right and left turns I found myself at a big, empty, unpaved lot, weeds all around. There was a small hut on the far side of the lot beside, yes, a railroad track. Very unprepossessing for an operation that caters to tourists!

I was wildly early, which is also very unusual for me. However, I had been determined not to repeat the debacle of my trip to New York this summer, when I missed the train due to a combination of leaving too late, and then taking the wrong exit off the turnpike. So I had to sit in my car for a good half hour, until the sight of others getting out of their cars -- which had been gradually arriving as I sat there -- suggested to me that the train must be arriving. This proved to be a false alarm -- the train was coming, but over there aways, and then it disappeared. At the end of the day, when we returned from Rockland, I learned why: the train has to drive a distance down the track, and then back up onto a different track, that runs to the empty lot. By the time of this enlightenment it had been a very long day -- officially 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., though since I'd been 45 minutes early it was that much longer for me -- and this tedious maneuver, which added a good ten minutes to our "arrival," (and we were running late anyway), made the corners of my mouth turn down. One hopes this will not be necessary when the new depot is up and running.

The Simmons group was supposed to have use of the Parlor Car, but it turned out tickets had been sold to individual passengers for that area (I used the restroom in there at one point, and could see nothing that suggested a parlor, saw nothing but regular seats, but apparently there is a "variety of seating and table configurations" at the far end, which supposedly justify paying $15 more a ticket), so we were pretty much on our own. Eventually the woman who had organized the trip, who went my coatless/gloveless state several levels better by wearing shorts, got permission from the conductor for our group to use the cafe car, which was not open for business because the help hadn't shown up . (We are obviously not talking Amtrak here.) However, by the time she got around to telling those of us in the car I was in, I was comfortably ensconced, in one of those train configurations where two seats face two other seats, and you have to watch out for one another's toes and knees, with two delightful ladies from New Jersey, who were on a separate bus tour (their bus would be picking them up in Rockland). I saw no reason to move. I hadn't come on this trip to hobnob with people I hadn't seen in 25 years (I knew no one in the Simmons group anyway), but for the pleasure of riding a train, and to look at fall foliage, which I was hoping would be more impressive than that in my own neighborhood.

Which it was, if not wildly so. For much of the trip you are riding through woods, often so thick with underbrush that you can't see far into them. Smears of red and orange, the colors that have been so noticeably missing in the Augusta area. Every now and then you come out into open marsh land, with rivulets of water full of lily pads winding through the golden reeds. Occasionally there are green fields beyond the marshes, with comfortable old New England farm houses, and the occasional cow. When we got closer to Rockland there were fields with more cows, much closer to the track, and Betty, one of my New Jersey ladies, said, "They aren't sitting down. They're supposed to sit down when it's raining." Obviously uneducated cows.

The most exciting part of the trip was just beyond the town of Wiscassett, when the train crosses a cove of the Sheepscot River. All of a sudden you do not see a rocky embankment sloping down from the edge of the train to the water, you see nothing but water. And water that is very close, not a good distance away, as when crossing a bridge. "Yikes!" I cried, glancing out, and down. "This has got to be one narrow railroad track; you can't even see it!" "Oh, my," said Betty. "Do you suppose we're safe?" "Can you swim?" I asked.