Bucksport Branch

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The Bucksport Branch is a railroad line in Maine that was operated by the Maine Central Railroad. It is now part of the Pan Am Railways system.

The Bucksport Branch junctions with the mainline at Bangor and continues south down the Penobscot River valley, passing through Brewer and terminating at Bucksport.

This 19 mi (31 km) branch was chartered in 1873 as the Bucksport and Bangor Railroad after its grade had been surveyed in the autumn of 1872. Construction of the line began in the spring of 1873 with trains beginning to run regularly over its whole length on December 21, 1874. The company was reorganized as the Eastern Maine Shoreline Railway in 1882, and leased as the Maine Central Bucksport branch in 1883. [1] The last passenger train from Bangor to Bucksport ran on 27 January 1932. [2] In the latter decades of Maine Central operation, two freight trains per day were typically pulled by a cab-to-cab pair of Maine Central's EMD SW7s and SW9s until the locomotives were assigned elsewhere in the Guilford system. [3] The paper mill at the end of the Bucksport Branch has been the primary customer of the line for many years and with its shutdown by mill owner Verso Paper Corporation [4] The rail traffic on the line will diminish until another large customer can be found. The last rail car removal was on December 11, 2014. The train consist was GMTX 3005 and MEC 374, pulling sixteen tank cars and three boxcars.

Route mileposts

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Maine Central Railroad main line

The Maine Central Railroad Company main line extended from Portland, Maine, east to the Canada–US border with New Brunswick at the Saint Croix-Vanceboro Railway Bridge. It is the transportation artery linking Maine cities to the national railway network. Sections of the main line had been built by predecessor railroads consolidated as the Maine Central in 1862 and extended to the Canada–US border in 1882. Through the early 20th century, the main line was double track from South Portland to Royal Junction, where it split into a lower road through Brunswick and Augusta and a back road through Lewiston which converged at Waterville into single track to Bangor and points east. Westbound trains typically used the lower road with lighter grades, while eastbound trains of empty cars used the back road. This historical description does not include changes following purchase of the Maine Central Railroad by Guilford Transportation Industries in 1981 and subsequent operation as part of Pan Am Railways.

References

  1. ↑ Peters, Bradley L. (1976). Maine Central Railroad Company. Maine Central Railroad.
  2. ↑ Johnson, Ron (1985). The Best of Maine Railroads. Portland Litho. p. 111.
  3. ↑ The 470 Railroad Club (1981). Meet the Maine Central. KJ Printing.
  4. ↑ "Verso Paper Corp. - Verso Paper Corp. Announces Permanent Shutdown of Three Paper Machines". Archived from the original on 2012-03-12. Retrieved 2014-12-08.
  5. ↑ Maine Central Railroad (1917). Hand-Book of Officers, Agents, Stations and Sidings. Edwin B. Robertson.
  6. 1 2 United States Department of Transportation (1974). Rail Service in the Midwest and Northeast Region. United States Government Printing Office.
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